well. it's 2024.

i'm tired. exhausted, even. i woke up at 9pm but have an appointment in the morning that i have to leave early for. i took melatonin, but now i just feel tired (bad) rather than tired (ready for sleep). frankly, i'm fucking miserable.

i gotta be honest, i didn't really think my seasonal depression or whatever the fuck was over, per se, but i sure as hell wasn't feeling it for a while there. winter break was a really nice space of two weeks or so not to have to think about anything. and now it's over and now everyone is pushing me back into the school conversation again and i'm just so fucking over it. i've been fucked over by forces completely out of my control with no recourse YET AGAIN, and there is truly not one fucking thing i can do about it. everything fell apart again and now i have to start over. again.

i'm so sick of it.

man, i hate being right.

well, our heater went out. or, well, it's about to. i heard a weird screeching noise coming from the basement that stopped when the heat kicked off. i caught a video and showed it to my grandmother, and a few minutes later it started back up again. she went down to investigate, and, yeah... it's the heater.

so, that's great. everything's still on for tomorrow (or today i guess) as far as i'm concerned - we have a fireplace so it's not like we'll be wearing coats inside the house. still annoying though. not to mention it's going down into the 20s tonight. cool, thanks.

this is about the 3rd time this has happened in a little under 5 years. the last time, in 2021, apparently the hvac people recommended we get a new one within the next two years, and. well. we can see where doing Not That has landed us. it's ~$4k to get a whole new unit, so hopefully we don't have to do that, but. you know. i'm not holding my breath.

to try to distance ourselves from that whole thing, my grandma suggested we watch the matrix for the first time. that was pretty cool. the first, like, 3/4 of the movie feel like they're going wayyyyy too fast. way too much information in very little time in ways that come without explaination. i guess that's to really get you in neo's head and feel what he's feeling, in which case they succeeded. it's just not really my kind of storytelling, i guess. kind of like fight club, in that regard - you don't know any more than the protagonist does.

i love fight club. i loved the ending. i'll have to write something about that soon - and evangelion, too.

you know, i kinda think that most of the, like... visual, i guess, media that i like is from the late 90s or early 00s. i really like the color grading of fight club, the grunge, the grime and blood, the darkness of it all. it really speaks to me. i love that blueish, high contrast film quality. it's really gorgeous.

the matrix isn't entirely unalike in it's aesthetics. a lot of the cgi comes off to me as kinda corny now, same thing goes for the acting at times. once you get to the halfway point, though, and shit really hits the fan, that's where i found myself getting invested.

i don't really consider myself a movie kinda person. i don't enjoy sitting down to watch the same thing for 1.5-2.5 hours. i wasn't overwhelmingly enthralled by anything about the movie, and in all honesty it triggered my dissociation a decent amount, but i really really do appreciate it for what it is. it's an objectively good film and i do like it. i don't know that i'd watch it more than once, though. i can count on one hand the number of movies i willingly watch, fight club being one of them. the others are rent and scott pilgrim. the eva rebuilds too, i guess, if those count. that makes more than 5 though.

i'm not such a big fan of the "chosen one" trope either, i don't think. one could argue that was what shinji had going on, but i feel like it was approached well and his actions towards that felt very realistic and logical. to me, neo's responses feel very forced, like he's only denying his status for the sake of advancing the story. which, like, he is... but... you know what i mean, right? i don't want that to be palpable. it interrupts my suspension of disbelief.

i think another piece of what makes the matrix somewhat... uncaptivating to me is that i feel a lot of parts of that story have turned into topes that have subsequently been done to death by now, by no fault of the movie's own. if anything, it's a testament to its success and impact.

i could probably go on and on about this for a another hour and a dozen more paragraphs but i can feel my benadryl and melatonin starting to kick in, so i think i'll leave things here for now. i can always come back and write another entry later.

oh, and before i leave, another thing: the main agent looks kinda like jacksfilms.

hello again :)

today was relatively uneventful. i bought myself some things for my family to hold as christmas presents since that works as a better system for everyone than just telling them what i want. i didn't sleep well last night at all, i kept waking up every few hours and finally stopped going back out at about 6am. safe to say i'm pretty tired.

i do have good news though! we're baking christmas cookies tomorrow, and this is the first year that my aunt will be bringing my baby cousin over - the last two years she wasn't able to make it, the first because he was only a month old and the second because someone in their house was sick, i don't remember who. we're gonna try to get him to put the sprinkles on, but i'm not sure how well a two year old is gonna do with that lol.

we have to take a last minute target trip tonight to pick up some ingredients. the second half of december really snuck up on us all. 2023 is going to be over really soon... i'm not too sure how i feel about that. definitely not good, as usual for me around new years. i don't handle change well.

i'm really hoping i can find a box of those tree shaped pillsbury sugar cookies. we already found the snowmen last night, but i was kinda banking on making a double batch. hopefully target can come through for us.

i hate the thirteenths of the month.

i've been an insomniac for basically forever now, so that means seeing the days turn over most nights. i also have ocd, mainly manifesting in the form of number and germaphobia/contamination obsessions. without fail, for the last few months, as soon as we hit the thirteenth, my brain hits me with the "you're gonna die today" line.

you know, it's really cool being convinced that you're just gonna drop dead for no reason. and by that i mean it's not cool at all, actually. things aren't helped by the fact that random, weird sterotypically unlucky things tend to happen on these days.

the hardest part about it is that deep down, you know your fear is irrational. but that doesn't absolve any of it at all. you still have to conform to your rituals, because you'll always be taunted by that ever present "but what if" feeling and at the end of the day, a lot of times it's just easier to do the thing that makes you feel better, whether that be flipping a lightswitch however many times or counting to a certain number before you do something or whatever else.

well. anyway.

i babysat my cousin alone for a few hours earlier today. two year olds are WAYYYYY overstimulating, but luckily his lunchtime was right in the middle of when i was watching him, so we spent most of that time with him in his high chair. i put max and ruby on instead of bluey since i watched that a lot as a kid, and he really liked it! i'm really glad because, as good as bluey is and as much as he likes it, it's not a very calm show. max and ruby on the other hand is very slow and quiet, making it much easier to watch for extended periods of time. my grandma got home as he was finishing up lunch, and we took him to a local park after. i really don't consider myself someone who likes kids very much, but he is really cute - he helps me put his mittens on, and he toppled over a few times walking up to the playground because he was so bundled up in warm clothes lol. it was really funny beacause he didn't even react, he just kinda faceplanted and waited for us to help him back up. i put him down for a nap after we got home and he was out within 20 minutes, so that was good too.

OH! i cut my hair last night! i still haven't bleached my roots or redyed it, but at least it's not in my eyes so bad anymore. i'm not super confident about how the back looks because i was kind of out of it last night and just took the clippers to the back of my dumb skull and hoped for the best. i think it worked out fine, especially since i use a styling razor to blend everything together anyway, but it's not like i can see what's going on back there too well. eh, whatever. it's not choppy, so even if it's not perfect, it's good enough.

i am a little bit worried about bleaching my roots though, just because they've gotten so long. i'm probably gonna get some banding again which is a pain in the ass, but you can't even see it under the dye anyway so i try not to worry about it too much. besides, i can always go back and fix it, it's just annoying to mix up multiple batches of bleach at once in different volumes when i do it initially.

god i need a nap so bad. some nicotine probably wouldn't hurt, too. i'm like $20 and a fake ID away from that addiction.

good evening (i guess?)

i went in for placement testing today to see where i am with my academics and figure out what subjects i need to work on to pass the GED exam. the good news is that i have very strong english skills, and most of the science stuff i need - and i should only need up to 8th grade science to pass, anyway.

we're still waiting on a call back from a local cosmetology school to see if they'll sign off on an age waiver since i'm still a minor, but since they require that you have a GED for admissions i don't really see that being an issue. still, fingers crossed!

speaking of hair, i reallyyyy need to dedicate a few hours to mine some time this week, maybe even later tonight. i've gotta have at least two inches of regrowth coming in and my red has faded out to creamsicle orange. i really need to cut it, too. my last bleach and cut session was before halloween.

oh - i also didn't have therapy this morning since my therapist is sick. cancellation was kinda good, kinda bad. on one hand, i was able to sleep in a little longer. on the other, it made it harder to get up for my other appointment since my routine got thrown off. you win some, you lose some, i guess.

in other news, i signed up for escargot wlm last week! i really really like it, it feels a lot like discord, just with shinier graphics. i've already started messaging back and forth with someone on there, which i never even would've DREAMED of doing a few years ago. i'm really glad i've been able to lessen my social anxiety so much - i used to have panic attacks just saying hi to people, lmao. it's really nice just being able to talk to someone without overthinking so much before i hit send the first time. all of the friends i've made up until now i've only made because they came to me first and consistently contacted me - it's cool being on the other side of that for once.

okay, getting a little too positive in here, time to complain. we're hitting the time of year up in the mid atlantic where the back of my hands start getting really dry. it's a new problem, too! it only started last year, and i ended up going to bed with aquaphor slathered on my hands most nights. this time around i feel like that tube isn't quite doing enough, so once my grandma gets home i'm gonna ask her to run me to the store so we can go look at some stronger options. i'm not at the point where my skin is getting flakey, but i am kinda itchy, so we're probably close to it. gross!

i think i'm gonna try to write a new entry here every other day or so, but don't hold me to that.

well, if there's one thing i've learned so far, it's that i fucking hate coding lol

as it turns out, i am very much a hardware guy, not a software guy. this shit is nightmare worthy. i don't think i could sit at a desk doing this all day, switching between vscode and stackoverflow. that sounds like hell on earth.

the thing is, it's really fun when it works. the problem is that most of the time it doesn't. and it's frustrating trying to figure things out just because i Don't Know Enough to know what's wrong, let alone how to fix it. google isn't entirely helpful either.

honestly, if i knew any even semi-complipcated languages, i think i would've taken over the world by now, and that's why i suck so bad. it's god's way of nerfing me because he's scared of what i'd do to him.

hopefully i get better with some more practice?

hey, look at that! i put together a template that i'm happy with.