Today I'm trying my hand at typing out the blog entry in the html editing console thing itself, since YWOT has been really glitchy lately... Wow, it's been so long since I had time to sit down and work on learing to code that I've already forgotten what everything is or what it's called. I think (I hope) it will be like riding a bike, and I'll remember like muscle-memory once I get back into it. My memory isn't very muscled, though.
Lately I've been feeling fed up with the same exact thing that every single other unmarried & childless 25-35 year old in the world has been complaining about for the last forever: the fabled work-life balance. What even is work-life balance? Honestly, when I hear it these days it sounds like those English loan words that morphed and evolved in a different language until they started sounding kind of unrecognizable, like the way that "home office" (read in a Hispanic accent) means "remote work/work from home" in my hometown in Mexico, and not "the space in your house with an expensive standing desk and a suitable Zoom background." Work-life balance sounds like a vague feeling or concept that was once an English word but got borrowed and swapped around the world too many times and now it's just a familiar jangle of syllables. I mean, what is the balance part supposed to be? I want to cry when I think about this. Am I supposed to sprinkle my hobbies and joy-sparking activities throughout my workday, rendering myself both inefficient at the "work" part and unsatisfied at the "life" part? Are b*tches out here crocheting a couple rows between each google calendar slot? Or am I supposed to clock in and out of my personal projects on the few daylight hours that I'm not going near blind from obsessively moving rectangles around on Figma? Honestly, I've tried both and neither tastes right. Plus, what happens when I'm married with a family to maintain on top of the job? Where does that fit into the balance??? Why hasn't anyone answered this question!??!?
I'm just being dramatic. I know this kinda just sounds like I should make myself single, celibate, and childless forever. To be honest, sometimes I think back to my elder female family members who definitely displayed traits of the modern hikkineet--like my aunt Elba, who lived with my great-grandmother until her death and spent her days lying in bed surfing the web and reading stacks upon stacks of paperback romance novels with a Big Gulp of Diet Coke in hand. I think she collected dolls, too. God, that actually sounds like heaven as I write this now. I'm not too far away from that, except I don't often live with my parents and I typically have a 9-5 job (she worked part time night shifts at Target) and a boyfriend, and both of those pretty much take up the whole day. I do like to sit in bed for hours typing on my computer or reading a book and mainlining diet cola, though.
Anway, I'm calm now. I always say that in the middle of an entry, don't I? Ok, so whenever I'm on a diet (like I am now) I like to play this game in my head where I list as many things I can think of that I want to eat right then. By the time I run out of things to list I've already gotten too distracted from the original craving to remember that I wanted it at all. (Shh!! I don't want to hear it from anyone who didn't get an eating disorder from growing up in the early 2000s). I'm gonna try to do that now with all the things that I wish I could have used my day for if it wasn't for having to work:
1. Finish the old drawings on my iPad 2. Start new pixel art projects that I've had planned for days 3. Work on my exciting freelance projects 4. Work on my boring freelance projects 5. Organize my closet for summer 6. List my old clothes for sale on their appropriate secondhand sites 7. Deep clean my house 8. Go for a 2 hour walk and finally sit down and play with my Pikmin Bloom app properly 9. Take a lot of photos on the walk and upload them to my flickr page and share them in the private group with my coworkers that we goof off in 10. Work on learning to code so I can make a much cuter website 11. Bake treats that fit within my dietary needs 12. Sit around on eBay for hours and track down all the stuff I still need for summer 13. Find the perfect pair of glasses 14. Finish reading my book and start chipping away at my TBR stack 15. Finally find all my cables and charge all my devices 16. Take a nap 17. Paint my nails 18. Go rock climbing 19. Buy a scanner and start making scanner collages again 20. Make random little aimless designs like I used to 21. Pickle red onions and make salsa for the week 22. Go downtown and walk aimlessly 23. Go to the West Loop and get an iced hojicha military latte from Sawada and a cookie from Levain 24. Go sniff fragrances and then get on the train and go to Chinatown when I get bored 25. Lay around in Logan Square park playing Ace Attorney on my 3DS 26. Go to a movie at Music Box (I'm doing that tomorrow actually) 27.
*Takes drag of cigarette* Hm....."cascading style sheets," huh? That's how they do it? *glances off into sunset* Well....looks like I'd better get to work.....
I made a major breakthrough today in learning how to code my website (not /a/ website, but /my/ website, let's keep that clear) and it's such a simple little thing that i feel too embarrassed to even admit what it was. Basically, it finally clicked how to use CSS for me, though I spent a bunch of time yesterday grumbling and complaining about how this all makes no sense. It just randomly clicked when I read a reddit comment, but that's how it is--you toil away for hours, googling clumsy iterations of the problem til some guy on reddit named UserNotFound666 with the little reddit guy icon passes by and says the magic words.
Honestly, this stuff is kinda interesting.
It'll be really useful for my job too, since we use webflow to set up our sites and maybe I could help my coworker out with her tasks. It also gives me much more patience for the dev who I used to clash heads with because he'd screw up coding my emails sometimes. Now I totally get it man, carry on sir, understandable have a nice day. Salute emoji. I need to do my makeup before this meeting but I'm really not feeling having a job right now. I wish I was a trust fund baby so that I could just spend the next few weeks fixating on learning to code. It's funny because I just told my partner the other day that I think "hyperfixations" aren't real. But seeing as I haven't been able to do much other than crank away at my code, it seems I was full of shit. I just like giving a controversial opinion sometimes, honestly. But I think I meant more that they aren't real in the way that people use that word, like "omg im having a richard nixon hyperfixation" and all they're doing is googling pics of him or reading his wikipedia page every so often and spamming their IG story about it. Like a couple people I follow on IG are trying to make "(insert animal) (insert day)" happen on their IG stories, and it kinda annoys me. I feel very "stop trying to make fetch happen" about it. I really don't care about what new pictures of an aardvark you found on google and the sassy captions you're giving them, what a pain. I'm swiping away from your story without tapping through. I'm such a hater. I really idolize HRH Collection---sans her actual opinions, I just like her attitude and relate to the weird autistic rage she gets into. Recently I wrote a long thing about experiencing autistic rage and how embracing the fact that I am on the spectrum has supremely enhanced my comfort and self-image. I've been experimenting with acting as I feel and not as I think I should act, which mostly just involves a lot of buffering and monotone speech as I try to work through all my thoughts before I allow myself to form a sentence. I quess this is what the kids call "masking," or the opposite I guess. I think all these terms are really stupid but I know they help people. I just hate taking myself seriously. But honestly, seeing the way HH randomly starts huffing and uncontrollably muttering to herself just because her bangs wont go the right way, I feel a full awareness and kinship. But, that being said, I also want to work on snapping myself out of my Hater Feedback Loops because honestly sometimes I finished making my point 10 minutes ago but I'm still stuck in the same hater rant and can't stop. It reminds me of the time a kid three or four times my size in middle school looked over my shoulder at my diary and laughed out loud, and the next thing I knew I was uncontrollably just totally waling on him with my fists and clawing with my nails. I still remember his huge back to me, colorblock striped polo shirt, likely real Ralph Lauren since this was during the year I lived in South Carolina. It's like, I knew the beating wasn't really doing anything, I would have gotten the same level of threat and anger-expression out with one concise slap or something, but I just couldn't stop. It was so weird. I was like, posessed. That's how I feel when I get into my Hater Negative Feedback Loop Rants (TM).
I just got home from Berghain.......just kidding. I only went around the outside and took some pictures, hehe. I had always kind of mystified it in my mind as a younger adult and teen, because I was very interested in the idea of counterculture and subculture, but the idea of counterculture becoming the mainstream culture, the hot thing to do...it's kind of sickening, no?
Plus, I'm certain it's mostly tourists and people whacked out on party drugs in there, and I'm at an age where I'm well over that sort of thing. The structure itself is, as I said before, gorgeous to me. I'm very strongly attracted to massive warehouse- buildings gutted and repurposed for something more grimy and gritty than blue-collar capitalism. I love the tons of identical long rectangular windows that line the building, and I love how every so often there's one window lit up purple or strobing or flashing or whatever. I have a decent enough idea of what it looks like inside. Ilango says you have to be a gay man to get in easily, and judging by the line I saw, it seems like that might be the case. Could I get in? I wonder. I'm interested in trying, if only for the meme-factor. Does that make sense? As I've written about before, a strong driving force in the events that make up my little life is how funny I think something will be. A lot of things I've done have happened simply because I thought it would be funny to make them happen. But sometimes these led to something traumatic. But that's life, yeah? Like Yume Nikki and LSD: Dream Emulator, sometimes you stumble into a lovely dream and sometimes you fuck around and find out.
It's a sunny day in Berlin today. It stormed last night for a little while, with even a bit of thunder. Today we're going to the Spreewald for the weekend and I'm really looking forward to spending some time in nature even though I'm a bit tired from having to wake up earlier than usual. I felt odd when I awoke. Lately hollowness has been creeping up on me again, and it's a bitter reminder that my poor mental health is ultimately unyielding to my material circumstances. I keep wanting to slap myself on the cheek and say, shut up, why would you be sad, you're in Berlin! But even if I were on top of the world I think I'd still be sad sometimes. It could just be a hormonal thing, I guess. It helps a lot to have somebody by your side who understands you and can relate to those kinds of things, so it's good that I have that. It's okay, it is what it is. It is how it is. Maybe they'll invent a kind of flu shot for depression. It's funny to constantly have to re-realize that I am a depressed person...I often have manic episodes or extended periods of neutrality, even positivity, and I forget that at my core there is a tightly wound knot of hopelessness. I'm glad I've grown past romanticizing this, though--I think it's a shame when I see young people online making a persona out of their suffering. I never found myself gaining anything positive from so freely giving myself to strangers online like that, in fact I think it kinda ruined my life in a way. But we all have to learn to deal with things in the way that works best for us. I'm comfortable with it now. Wallowing wasn't helpful.