Emergency back up computer is reminding me why it's emergency back up computer. I just got done yelling profanity at it and crying in its general direction.
It stopped working, I know not why, and after trying the usual things it became clear that the only hope of preserving the things I had opened was to run the battery down because the auto power off when that happens (accompanied by the system resume when you start it afterward) is actually pretty decent at fixing things.
The battery has never lasted anywhere near as long as it did. Finally I gave up, apparently there was only four percent left to go.
If the power cord is in certain positions (which are basically impossible to predict or keep track of) it'll power down instantaneously killing everything. It threw that at me several times when I tried to get it to start up.
None of that is the problem.
It's just easy to shout and cry at.
I want to have kids. I don't know if I ever mentioned that here before. I suspect that I haven't.
So, have that snippet of information. I want to have kids. Biological ones, not adopted. For reasons I don't think I'd ever be able to articulate, it's important to me. Has been for what certainly feels like forever.
I'm no closer to being the sort of person who could actually support a child (at all) than I was in high school. What I am is older. I'm not quite there yet, but high school was almost half a lifetime ago.
Actually, in the not-quite (but close to) half my life I've lived since leaving high school, I've done surprisingly little. It's not for lack of trying so much as lack of succeeding. At anything.
Outside of my education, the only thing I've really accomplished is transitioning. That's certainly not nothing (I'm sure things would be worse if I were in the closet and pretending to be male) but it's not a lot. And it's not enough.
I'm not living any more, not really. I'm just . . . here. Surrounded by the detritus of a lifetime worth of broken dreams and false hopes.
Usually the best I can hope for is distraction. It used to be that stories made me feel alive and helped reinvigorate my own creativity, these days I read this fanfiction or play that game in hopes of momentarily being distracted from the bleak and disheartening thing that is my life.
When it works, that can be as bad as when it doesn't. It becomes compulsive, takes over everything, and suddenly I'm ignoring basic bodily needs in order to continue something that brings me no pleasure.
I'm sad all the time.
(Except for the times when I can't feel anything at all.)
It feels like I deserve it.
Whenever I do manage to do something I can be proud of (usually some bit of writing), it seems like it's only lifting me up so that I'll crash all the harder.
I know that it's probably not the best time to try to put my life in perspective when I'm two years and counting into "Markedly worse than normal" and nine months to a year (I've honestly lost track) into "Even worse than that", but at the same time, there's nothing particularly unreasonable or illogical that goes into how I'm seeing things right now.
If anything it's the other way around. I spent so long keeping myself going by lying to myself. I knew they were lies, but it worked to keep me busy, to keep me from being stuck alone with myself and my failures the way I am right now.
I got myself to try to do a lot of things I wanted to do anyway by telling myself the monetary and "Save the Farm" equivalent of "Today Gotham, tomorrow the world!"
I didn't succeed in a single one of the things I did because of that, but I tried them, and they were things I wanted to try anyway.
The truth is, looking at things in terms of success or failure is too rosy of a view. What typically happened is I'd get one or two steps in, and then completely fall apart.
My writing is like that. It's why I have so very few finished stories. Even when I somehow capture a spark of inspiration, I can't keep it alive.
Stepping back from writing for a bit, I was able to keep myself going through some of the worst times (and a lot of the "still horrible but not exceptionally so" times) by lying to myself and saying that if I tried [whatever] it wouldn't just be for myself, but a step toward saving the farm.
The farm is gone. The house and greenhouse have been demolished. I don't have any new lies to tell myself.
From a "Lies = Bad; Truth = Good" perspective, that might not seem like a bad thing, but I can't get by on the truth alone. I've tried. It doesn't work.
The truth is that there are about a million things I'd like to do, and I could probably be happy doing any given handful of them, but I never manage to do a single one.
I end up a crying mess.
I end up an apathetic lump.
I find myself in a place where I can't even make myself stand up
I get so fucking sad.
I scream profanity at inanimate objects.
I loose all hope that I'll ever actually finish anything.
I loose all hope that I'll ever actually start most things.
I look around me and see all of the evidence of things I've tried to do in the past --good ideas that could have blossomed into wonderful things in the care of someone less broken than me-- and I remember the one constant of my life:
The world around me changes, it grows, it wilts, it gets brighter or darker, it progresses and regresses, it brings forth new and different thing, it can be terrible, or wonderful, or mundane, but it's always in motion and always alive.
I'm not. I stagnate.
Other than getting older, I don't change, I don't grow, I don't live.
I just exist. Like a rock that's somehow managed to develop clinical depression.
And then, when I somehow manage to get ahold of something worthwhile in spite of all that, I fuck it up.
I had some good inspiration for a story not long before I started writing this. I still remember the gist, but I'd already had the gist. The good was in the details. I lost them because I was too busy crying about my computer.
I don't think there's anything anyone can really do to help, but if you want to try (and you have the resources), I need money as much as always.
While I've been fucked up, speaking in terms of mental health, I've done a shit job of keeping up on my bills. The fact that I was burning through heating oil way faster than I should have been (there's a story there involving a cat that turned out to be non-magical) didn't help. Neither do the late fees.
I don't think, emotionally, I can handle looking up the exact numbers right now, but --off the top of my head-- I think I'm in the vicinity of $2,000 dollars behind on the "keep the house" expenses, caught up (after months of delinquency) on utilities, and . . . actually more than capable of covering other expenses.
That's slightly less bad than I thought it would be.
Given that I'm finally actually making progress on backing up primary computer (so I can get the damned thing fixed) again, there is actually another thing that comes to mind regarding things that might help.
It would be really, indescribably, useful to me to have the ability to store all of my old data in a single place, preferably one with redundancy. (A constant source of frustration is when I have an idea for story X but all of the relevant data for story X is on another hard drive.)
Shortly before I broke my ankle, someone actually had something that met that description that they weren't using anymore. It was heavy, my ankle was broken. Getting it to me was put on hold, and I never followed up.
That was over two years ago, I doubt they still have it, but if one person could have such a thing that's free to good home, perhaps someone else could too.
And something else does come to mind too.
Someone (Brin maybe?) once talked about figuring out how to eat (get sufficient calories, nutrients, so forth) on their budget via the magical power of spreadsheets.
If anyone has spreadsheets, or whatever, like that and is willing to share, I think such things could be very useful to me.
It stopped working, I know not why, and after trying the usual things it became clear that the only hope of preserving the things I had opened was to run the battery down because the auto power off when that happens (accompanied by the system resume when you start it afterward) is actually pretty decent at fixing things.
The battery has never lasted anywhere near as long as it did. Finally I gave up, apparently there was only four percent left to go.
If the power cord is in certain positions (which are basically impossible to predict or keep track of) it'll power down instantaneously killing everything. It threw that at me several times when I tried to get it to start up.
None of that is the problem.
It's just easy to shout and cry at.
~ ⁂ ~
I want to have kids. I don't know if I ever mentioned that here before. I suspect that I haven't.
So, have that snippet of information. I want to have kids. Biological ones, not adopted. For reasons I don't think I'd ever be able to articulate, it's important to me. Has been for what certainly feels like forever.
I'm no closer to being the sort of person who could actually support a child (at all) than I was in high school. What I am is older. I'm not quite there yet, but high school was almost half a lifetime ago.
Actually, in the not-quite (but close to) half my life I've lived since leaving high school, I've done surprisingly little. It's not for lack of trying so much as lack of succeeding. At anything.
Outside of my education, the only thing I've really accomplished is transitioning. That's certainly not nothing (I'm sure things would be worse if I were in the closet and pretending to be male) but it's not a lot. And it's not enough.
I'm not living any more, not really. I'm just . . . here. Surrounded by the detritus of a lifetime worth of broken dreams and false hopes.
Usually the best I can hope for is distraction. It used to be that stories made me feel alive and helped reinvigorate my own creativity, these days I read this fanfiction or play that game in hopes of momentarily being distracted from the bleak and disheartening thing that is my life.
When it works, that can be as bad as when it doesn't. It becomes compulsive, takes over everything, and suddenly I'm ignoring basic bodily needs in order to continue something that brings me no pleasure.
I'm sad all the time.
(Except for the times when I can't feel anything at all.)
It feels like I deserve it.
Whenever I do manage to do something I can be proud of (usually some bit of writing), it seems like it's only lifting me up so that I'll crash all the harder.
~ ⁂ ~
I know that it's probably not the best time to try to put my life in perspective when I'm two years and counting into "Markedly worse than normal" and nine months to a year (I've honestly lost track) into "Even worse than that", but at the same time, there's nothing particularly unreasonable or illogical that goes into how I'm seeing things right now.
If anything it's the other way around. I spent so long keeping myself going by lying to myself. I knew they were lies, but it worked to keep me busy, to keep me from being stuck alone with myself and my failures the way I am right now.
I got myself to try to do a lot of things I wanted to do anyway by telling myself the monetary and "Save the Farm" equivalent of "Today Gotham, tomorrow the world!"
I didn't succeed in a single one of the things I did because of that, but I tried them, and they were things I wanted to try anyway.
The truth is, looking at things in terms of success or failure is too rosy of a view. What typically happened is I'd get one or two steps in, and then completely fall apart.
My writing is like that. It's why I have so very few finished stories. Even when I somehow capture a spark of inspiration, I can't keep it alive.
Stepping back from writing for a bit, I was able to keep myself going through some of the worst times (and a lot of the "still horrible but not exceptionally so" times) by lying to myself and saying that if I tried [whatever] it wouldn't just be for myself, but a step toward saving the farm.
The farm is gone. The house and greenhouse have been demolished. I don't have any new lies to tell myself.
From a "Lies = Bad; Truth = Good" perspective, that might not seem like a bad thing, but I can't get by on the truth alone. I've tried. It doesn't work.
The truth is that there are about a million things I'd like to do, and I could probably be happy doing any given handful of them, but I never manage to do a single one.
I end up a crying mess.
I end up an apathetic lump.
I find myself in a place where I can't even make myself stand up
I get so fucking sad.
I scream profanity at inanimate objects.
I loose all hope that I'll ever actually finish anything.
I loose all hope that I'll ever actually start most things.
I look around me and see all of the evidence of things I've tried to do in the past --good ideas that could have blossomed into wonderful things in the care of someone less broken than me-- and I remember the one constant of my life:
The world around me changes, it grows, it wilts, it gets brighter or darker, it progresses and regresses, it brings forth new and different thing, it can be terrible, or wonderful, or mundane, but it's always in motion and always alive.
I'm not. I stagnate.
Other than getting older, I don't change, I don't grow, I don't live.
I just exist. Like a rock that's somehow managed to develop clinical depression.
~ ⁂ ~
And then, when I somehow manage to get ahold of something worthwhile in spite of all that, I fuck it up.
I had some good inspiration for a story not long before I started writing this. I still remember the gist, but I'd already had the gist. The good was in the details. I lost them because I was too busy crying about my computer.
~ ⁂ ~
I don't think there's anything anyone can really do to help, but if you want to try (and you have the resources), I need money as much as always.
While I've been fucked up, speaking in terms of mental health, I've done a shit job of keeping up on my bills. The fact that I was burning through heating oil way faster than I should have been (there's a story there involving a cat that turned out to be non-magical) didn't help. Neither do the late fees.
I don't think, emotionally, I can handle looking up the exact numbers right now, but --off the top of my head-- I think I'm in the vicinity of $2,000 dollars behind on the "keep the house" expenses, caught up (after months of delinquency) on utilities, and . . . actually more than capable of covering other expenses.
That's slightly less bad than I thought it would be.
~ * ~
Given that I'm finally actually making progress on backing up primary computer (so I can get the damned thing fixed) again, there is actually another thing that comes to mind regarding things that might help.
It would be really, indescribably, useful to me to have the ability to store all of my old data in a single place, preferably one with redundancy. (A constant source of frustration is when I have an idea for story X but all of the relevant data for story X is on another hard drive.)
Shortly before I broke my ankle, someone actually had something that met that description that they weren't using anymore. It was heavy, my ankle was broken. Getting it to me was put on hold, and I never followed up.
That was over two years ago, I doubt they still have it, but if one person could have such a thing that's free to good home, perhaps someone else could too.
~ * ~
And something else does come to mind too.
Someone (Brin maybe?) once talked about figuring out how to eat (get sufficient calories, nutrients, so forth) on their budget via the magical power of spreadsheets.
If anyone has spreadsheets, or whatever, like that and is willing to share, I think such things could be very useful to me.
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