oh, hi. happy saturday.

hope you don’t mind, sometimes i just have to babble in blog-form. i’ve tried reviving old blogger/wordpress/livejournal pages a few times to fill that void, but i still find myself coming back to use MLTSHP as a blog anyway. i feel like i can be plainspoken and personal here; it’s a wholesome kind of therapy for me, and i appreciate the people here who support that.

i’m typing this out on my work-issued extended magic keyboard. while disassembling my kitchen-table WFH setup, i tried pairing it to my ipad, and discovered that i love the feel of it in iOS. makes me want to get spendy on the ipad magic keyboard, but i’m trying really hard to be better about superfluous purchases.

i was disassembling the setup because, after waiting an entire year for response on a maintenance ticket about my failing MBP battery, they finally let me bring it in to the office. that was a relief, but they gave me an old 15” loaner to work on in the meantime, and i spent the entire week fighting to get my development environment up and running. as a company, we’re genuinely terrible about documentation, and i was in tears half the week trying to reconnect internal repositories, fix up automated actions in my initialization/configuration files, yadda yadda. needless to say, i got jack shit done, and i felt guilty about it. (capitalist programming, it gets to you!)

i’m a very non-technical person in a very non-technical team at a very technical company. i love my team and my work in general, and it feels good to learn new stuff from my curation work on a day-to-day basis, but it’s hard to not feel looked down on by the developers for being unable to do certain stuff in terminal or remember lots of functions off the top of my head. as i get on into my 8th year here, i realize that eventually i should be thinking of where i want to be next, what i can do to make life less month-to-month, and how i should improve myself to take steps forward.

speaking of jobs, after a few months of being laid off (rather unfairly, i might add), my roommate got herself a new job out in california. i’m glad she has that off her chest now and is ready to get started on a new chapter outside this town. she’s smart and deserves to branch out. that said, though, this house is hers, and i’ve got to start looking for a roommate to be able to pay the bills. it’ll be refreshing to have a new person in the house, hopefully someone who will enjoy films or music with me and won’t listen to NPR podcasts on speakerphone while i’m trying to work, hah.

i always get a little nervous when my daily routines have to change, so the thought of having to find a roommate is a little unnerving, but i guess this is the year of shaking things up in hopes of eventually arriving at a better routine. i’ve been trying to readjust some of my bad habits and correct my daily routines, and (knock on wood) it seems to be working so far.

i made myself stop getting takeout every friday, and i cut out the unnecessary stress-snacks from drugstores and checkout racks. i pared back how much “fun money” i had in my budget each month and made things a little less easy to anxiety-buy shit from the web. i pushed myself back into the strict eating routine i had when i was in my twenties. so far, it actually seems like it’s paying off.

i’ve actually dropped the better part of ten pounds now, and i can feel my body reacting more strongly to the “good” and “bad” options, making indulgences less enticing than they were a few months ago. i know i’ve got to make myself see a doctor about some internal issues (blood pressure, anxiety, etc), but this new routine at least mitigates a good chunk of the physical blegh-ness day-to-day.

the financial improvements are coming more slowly; i’ve always been able to pay my bills, loans, and expenses, but i’ve also always been bad at saving and planning. a lot of it boils down to reminding myself of need versus want, AKA saying “you do not need [gadget/record/book/object] this moment, the universe will not explode if you do not buy it in the next five minutes”. i do still find myself caving to anxiety “treats” once in a while, but at least it seems to be tapering off since the start of the year. sure, i bought a bluetooth travel keyboard for the ipad after screaming at my loaner laptop all week, but at least it was the $30 logitech one and not the $200 apple one. we’ll get to “fully fiscally responsible adult” one step at a time.

i’m glad the self-improvement routines are sticking so far, because there’s so much more to do beyond that - relearning how to be a better friend to people, recapturing my everyday patience, rekindling my political/artistic/academic interests, maybe even giving romantic love another try someday. but i can’t take all those in one go; i have to pace myself.

anyway! hi. happy saturday.

I miss him so much. 19 years!

source: https://twitter.com/goth_vid...

Achieved full 5G reception bandwidth, and full integration into the Bill Gates Global Network.

Was so happy to get the shot, I even put on my Creed Aventus that I've been hoarding for special occasions.

(Edit: And apparently, the sideways is permanent!)

source: https://twitter.com/NifMuham...

source: https://twitter.com/scottyth...

source: https://www.facebook.com/

The snow is melting, the buds are barely starting to appear, the elk are in gorgeous velvet, and the "red dog" baby bison are coming into their own.

Roni Horn, Library of Water, 2007, installation of 24 glass columns containing glacial water

Been working on this one for a few days.

source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r...

source: https://twitter.com/DuckAler...

source: https://twitter.com/thetzech...

source: https://www.facebook.com/photo...

source: https://ymutate.tumblr.com/post...

source: https://twitter.com/chadlode...

nsfw b/c covidiocy

At the end of this month, I'm going to actually go to a movie theater. Crazy!

Photo: Thomas Hoepker, Naples, Italy, 1956

Source: https://post.lurk.org/@paul...

Hisashi Saito
1980

#paintings