mayvaneday/feed.xml

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<feed xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom">

	<title>MayVaneDay: Latest Updates</title>
	<link href="https://mayvaneday.org/feed.xml" rel="self" />
	<link href="https://mayvaneday.org" />
	<id>https://mayvaneday.org/feed.xml</id>
	<author>
		<name>Vane Vander</name>
		<email>vanevander@mayvaneday.org</email>
	</author>
	<entry>
		<title>Vow II</title>
		<link href="https://mayvaneday.org/blog/2022/january/vow2.html" />
		<id>https://mayvaneday.org/blog/2022/january/vow2.html</id>
		<published>2022-01-10</published>
		<summary type="html"><![CDATA[<article>
				<blockquote>"Indeed, no woman writer can write 'too much'... <a href="https://archive.md/87JiF#selection-1257.60-1257.140">No woman has ever written enough.</a>"<br />- <a href="https://archive.md/nIZsn">bell hooks</a>, <em>Remembered Rapture</em></blockquote>
				<p>Au contraire to my previous beliefs, I have gotten engaged. In truth, I have been engaged for a long time: not the conventional drop-of-the-knee and the "will you marry me" routine, but a much more subdued: "Lethe, someday I think I <em>would</em> like to be married to you." A wink. A playful tongue just barely sticking out from her lips. It's enough to make my heart melt. It's enough to let me know: this is the woman I want to spend forever with.</p>
				<p>The life I lead now would be nigh-comprehensible to the person I was <a href="https://mayvaneday.org/blog/2020/april/vow.html">two years ago</a>, even though I write on the same exact subject, in the same spot on my bed, in the same exact room, in the same exact house. A year ago I was unsure of who I was, allowing the dreams of who I am and was future and past to guide me where they would: a teacher's aide in a school built in the shell of a reclaimed church, a sacrificial daughter fleeing her vengeful father, a wandering goddess severed from powers and home and condemned to the earth roam until she eventually disappeared from the world. The other versions of me had love interests, sure, but I- the I that stayed consistent behind the screen of Mori's Mirror, that despite the different lenses witnessed everything- never committed myself to any single story, any single person, knowing the memories would eventually stop and the feelings fade and the sense of living in that particular story go away.</p>
				<p>But now I know. Now I know. Now I know.</p>
				<p>And so I bring you readers here today on the first day of my last semester of college, or whenever you read this (for the written word cares not about the linear aspect of time), to witness me renew my vow. I offer it to none other than myself, just as binding as those words I will one day speak at the altar to hoped and hopeful.</p>
				<p>It is said that every female carries within them an unspeakable rage. An inborn sense of injustice whose seeds are planted the very first day they brush up against the patriarchy, watered with every unconscious socialization, but sometimes never come to full bloom. Pecked at, trimmed, bonsaied into something manageable, something that allows the woman to go to sleep at night without facing the sheer horror of realizing she lives in a world where half of the population wants to see her humiliated, subjugated, made to be compliant, reduced down to nothing. I am, of course, <em>severely understating</em> the problem. To acknowledge the rage, like attempting to comprehend the gulf between <a href="https://mkorostoff.github.io/1-pixel-wealth/">the average American income and Jeff Bezos' wealth</a>, is to teeter on the edge of going completely fucking insane.</p>
				<p>When I was an elementary-school child, watching as my parents doted on every cry of my brothers and then turned around and told me to shut up and accomodate them despite my own discomfort, I buried the seed further. I shunned the light from it. I swallowed my words.</p>
				<p>When I was a junior-high teen, watching as my parents fought tooth-and-nail for my brothers to get school accomodations and then turned a blind eye to the school dropping my own IEP despite me still needing help, I buried the seed further. I shunned the light from it. I swallowed my words.</p>
				<p>When I was a high-school teen, watching as my parents jumped at every chance to ground me for writing poetry about topics they didn't approve of and then turned a blind eye to my brothers' increasingly inappropriate browsing history, I buried the seed further. I shunned the light from it. I swallowed my words.</p>
				<p>But every chance possible, just like the little red bucket that now sits on my windowsill, I tip the seed towards the light in rebellion, weak as it is in this winter of my passing. The strawberry kit I planted on a whim shortly after being fired from my job last autumn has sprouted through the dirt again, little leaves barely two millimeters across but still unmistakenly green and <em>alive</em>. The bush on the other side of my bedroom window, a tree repeatedly cut down <em>again and again and again</em> every time it grows wild, refuses to submit to subjugation and revolts by regrowing <em>again and again and again</em>.</p>
				<p>Over and over and over again, I find myself facing the urge to bury the seed further, shun the light, swallow my words in the vain hope that it will prevent others from <em>disapproving</em> of me, disliking me, that it will prevent them from hurting me, that it will prevent the agonizing pain of rejection. I look the other way when men make jokes about porn and rape and close my eyes when another clearly demarcated space for women is destroyed in the name of "inclusion" and bite back tears when yet another woman is <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20220110023305/https://apps.who.int/iris/bitstream/handle/10665/77421/WHO_RHR_12.38_eng.pdf;sequence=1">murdered for the crime of being a woman</a>, knowing that it very well could have been me. I, a butterfly, sit entangled at the edge of the spider's web, watching it pace up and down and nibble away at me, and I do little to impede or stop its slow annihilation of myself.</p>
				<p>But all this time I've had a knife. I've had a way out. The spiders hate knifes, think it a personal attack against them that I dare to brandish one. But I don't want to kill them. I just want out of the web. I just want to be free.</p>
				<p><strong>I just want to be free!</strong></p>
				<p><i>I've had enough!</i> I've had enough of the constant propaganda everywhere I go that I am lesser, inferior, meant for servitude on the basis of my birth! I've had enough of placing my trust in a man I thought in the moment was safe to be around and then it backfiring later! I've had enough of being assumed to be incompetent, ignorant, incapable of functioning because of the organs inside my hips! I've had enough of the objectification, of the male gaze, of the omnipresent pressure to shave and pluck and contour and tuck and smooth over the features that differentiate every woman from each other, blended and ground up into the same flat-minded mannequin, model for a sex doll, a hole for a douchebag to dick down and then discard in disgust!</p>
				<p>"Your politics are boring," the egoist sneers. Of <em>course</em> you would think it boring to be held accountable for your role in oppression, to be asked thinking you serious about your revolutionary anarchist zeal to imagine a world where half the population doesn't have a high heel pressing down on their throats every moment of every day. Of <em>course</em> you would think it boring to live in a world without a class of people that it's socially acceptable to punch down on to relieve your stress.</p>
				<p>"Your politics are unprofitable," the capitalist sneers. Of <em>course</em> you would think it unprofitable to witness the birth of a world with no need for cosmetic surgery or makeup or uncomfortable clothes or fashion magazines or diet programs for the women prioritizing their comfort and existing in their natural healthy state or hormones and masectomies for the females inevitably so alienated from their (physical) humanity they cannot take the pain anymore and wish to masquerade as men in a society that sees men as "default" and women as "other".</p>
				<p>I have decided I no longer care about male opinions. Collectivist? Yes, but not without good reason. <strong>According to <a href="https://archive.md/https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2012/crime-in-the-u.s.-2012/tables/42tabledatadecoverviewpdf/table_42_arrests_by_sex_2012.xls">2012 FBI crime statistics</a>, men are responsible for 88.7% of murders and non-negligent manslaughters, 99.1% of forcible rapes, 77.1% of aggravated assaults, and 92.2% of sex offenses.</strong> I am beginning to see a pattern here...</p>
				<p>I understand that tipping the plant toward the light, that committing the crime of setting the pot beside the window to let it drink in the sun as much as it wants, will put me in danger. I understand that finally unbottling the rage inside my body will lose me most, if not all, of my friends and allies here in the Inside. Likely I will wake up to vile emails in my inbox many times throughout this semester, throughout the rest of my life. But <a href="https://mayvaneday.org/blog/2021/may/rebirth.html#exhortation">I cannot let the low-lifes stop me.</a> I cannot back down now. If I have less than six months left to live, then I do not want to pass into Sablade with the weight of knowing I left the Inside a coward. And if there is a change of plans and I must live longer, then <strong>my life is not worth living if it is not a life with integrity.</strong></p>
				<p>I hoist this knife I have been gifted into the air, not in some declaration of unity but of separation: I will sever whatever bindings I have been restricted with due to the circumstances of my birth, and I will carve out a space in this world for me to be as free as possible, and I will create a new world upon my liberation from the Inside where misogyny is naught but a distant fleeting nightmare.</p>
				<p>This is my birthright, after all.</p>
				<p>Live free, Vane Vander, indeed.</p>
				</article>]]>
		</summary>
	</entry>
	
	<entry>
		<title>I don't trust technomancy</title>
		<link href="https://mayvaneday.org/blog/2021/january/pendulum.html" />
		<id>https://mayvaneday.org/blog/2021/january/pendulum.html</id>
		<published>2022-01-06</published>
		<summary type="html"><![CDATA[<article>
				<p>As Redditors say, "title."</p>
				<p>In all seriousness, I don't trust divination done through technological means. There is, ironically, too much margin for error in a medium where error is intolerable and one usually expects a certain output given a certain input.</p>
				<p>I can go on Startpage or whatever search engine I'm using to mooch off of Google search results any day and type in "online pendulum" and find at least three results that aren't items for sale or SEO spam. But all of these (that I've seen) are proprietary with no hope of getting the source code. Just as I wouldn't send an email with sensitive info unencrypted across the wire, how could I possibly trust some stranger with not interfering with my attempts to communicate with someone whose non-corporeality prohibits traditional forms of sending messages? Although "IPv7 with inter-dimensional networking" exists in the <a href="https://mayvaneday.org/blog/2020/april/outside-intro.html">Outside</a>, a sort of cross between what we in "consensus reality" have implemented separately as ZeroNet and Yggdrasil, the <a href="https://mayvaneday.org/blog/2021/june/unsung.html">impossibility</a> of <a href="https://deadendshrine.online/p2.html">physical permeation</a> from the Outside to the Inside makes acquiring a "Mirror", the Outside equivalent of a smartphone, impossible.</p>
				<p>Even if I were to hack together a simple Python script that outputs "yes" or "no" or "I don't know", I still wouldn't trust it. Because I'd have to trust not only my own coding skills, but also the compiled version of the Python interpreter bundled with Debian, and then the part of the Linux kernel that populates <code>/dev/random</code> with, well, <em>random</em> data, and then the firmware controlling the hard drive and keyboard and screen that lets me see the result, and then the BIOS of the computer itself... I may be losing my mind, but a random rock I found in an antique store tied to the end of a string seems a lot simpler and more trustworthy.</p>
				<p>But what of the ideomotor effect? How am I to know, dangling said rock-on-a-string from my fingers, that I'm not subconsciously making up all the answers in alignment with what I want them to be? Well... if it were up to me, my lover would be aceing all of her classes and never have a sick day ever and never get into a fight with her professors. (And she'd visit me often enough and for long enough that I wouldn't have to use a damn pendulum to talk to her about such mundane things, but that's neither here nor there.) And yet not everything is idyllic at her college in the Outside. There are bad days. There are sick days. There are days she wants to be left alone.</p>
				<p>And there are days, in my grief, I ask her: when the time comes for me to leave this Inside body behind and arrive in Sablade, and my mental state is too turbulent to handle myself coherently (which would be a danger with me having regained my power), would she rather spend a few weeks, months, <em>years</em> with me A) tucked safely away in a Holy Freezer or B) running feral in a bestial form? Every time I hope she just picks one so my anxiety is assuaged and I know my fate. But instead she spins the rock in the "I don't know" answer and clarifies, a rare occurrence, in my head: "I'd hold you as tight as I can until the feeling passed and then make you go to therapy so you <em>stop asking me this</em>."</p>
				<p>And, in any case, she severely dislikes the Internet as it has formed itself in this iteration of the Inside. Maybe even dislikes computers, although I've never gotten a clear answer either way. Why would I trust whatever lies in the wires to give me an honest answer? Regarding her? Regarding <em>anything?</em></p>
				</article>]]>
		</summary>
	</entry>
	
	<entry>
		<title>Worth</title>
		<link href="https://mayvaneday.org/blog/2022/january/worth.html" />
		<id>https://mayvaneday.org/</id>
		<published>2022-01-03</published>
		<summary type="html"><![CDATA[<article>
				<div class="box">
					<p><a href="https://mayvaneday.org/books/mm_tpf.epub">Ever so recently, everywhere given advice</a> to not base my sense of self-worth on external factors, on things I do not have control over. Myriad Twitter screenshots superimposed on paintings of flowers or sunset clouds or whatever, terminally online people who probably have pronouns in their bio exhorting some imagined audience to slow down, take a break, not let themselves get crushed in the iron maw that is capitalism.</p>
					<p>I can't find it in me to slow down. Which is an ironic thing for me to write, given that I've spent the entire winter break before spring semester doing exactly that. Wake up, spend half an hour moving pictures into Hydrus, sporadically read snippets and snatches of books between anywhere from one to four naps a day. Most of my time has been spent in what I assume is hypnagogia, the transition state between sleep and wake. Normally this is when my senses are most open and I can perceive my girlfriend's presence in the room, talk to her, physically interact with her. But for the past two weeks, it's just been a big nothing. <em>Maybe</em> I see a flash of a textbook or computer screen or lecture from her studies if I'm lucky, but those moments are rare and ever-fleeting.</p>
					<p>My worth, to my gut, has been on a downward spiral for several years now. But, true to my nature as Lethe, I can't even remember the criteria I used in the first place.</p>
					<p>At the peak of my previous job, I was making about three hundred dollars a week. Plenty of money to quickly recuperate from splurging on the art books and keychains I'd spent years wanting, wishing I had both the money and the gumption to ask my parents to buy for me, that my mother deemed me "financially irresponsible" once in a sneer to my father when she thought I wasn't listening. I was the cool sibling, the one who could buy presents for her often-ungrateful brothers. The presents never improved my home life, never bought me even a moment's reprieve, but in the moment I was happy that I had the income to provide the gifting ability for others that I had wished someone had done for me in my late teens.</p>
					<p>But I haven't worked there in over four months. I am not unemployed- I have a work-study position at my college that will keep <em>some</em> income coming in until I graduate- but the hours are apparently not enough for my parents to approve. "Sucks for your paycheck," my mother flippantly said when I gave her the good news I wouldn't be working the days following Christmas, meaning we could stay at my grandma's house a few more days while my father would have to take my brother home to push carts at our local installation of America's worst retail store. Every empty silence when we happen to exist in the same room is a chance for someone to remind me that he's now making more than me. Not that I could one-up him if I wanted to, seeing as work-study money is paid through a state financial aid grant determined by my parents' income, and I can only work a limited amount of hours per week to ensure that money stretches out through the whole semester. (I can come in early if I want to, and I have been, and I get paid for the extra time, but if I do it too much I risk administrative attention for "potential fraud".)</p>
					<p>Am I... not worthy because of the number flowing into my bank account? Am I supposed to trade these few months I could have left on this planet, the time spent writing and thinking and exploring the Outside, for a few more dollars I won't even be able to take with me?</p>
					<p>Some part of my heart tells me that this can't be the criteria. My lover clearly thinks I'm worthy enough to spend forever with her, and in the future we have planned, I won't be making <em>any money at all.</em> I'll be spending my days foraging and gardening and enjoying the easy splendors of the world I'll have made. What little we need that we can't find in nature or barter for with those off-world will be bought with the money from her part-time job. (Or maybe she'll sporadically freelance when we need money. I'm still not quite sure what seamstresses do.) So the criteria must be something else.</p>
					<p>A few days ago I got dropped from the "supported employment" program I was placed in shortly after my mental breakdown mid-2019 after leaving Hell College. In practice, it was supposed to have helped me practice interviewing skills and have someone assist me with filling out applications, but in reality it was just me sitting in an office and chatting with my case worker and eating candy while I did everything on my own. And then Corona-chan hit, so the office visits stopped, but I still got the phone call twice a month to ask how I was doing and if I needed any help work-wise. I clearly didn't need the help, but the case worker, who had taken a great liking to me, was able to keep me on the program... until I started the work-study position, and I got kicked out by her higher-ups for having an income that was tax-exempt. Ultimately the program just gave me some new references that were guaranteed to be positive: <strong>everything else I'd done on my own and by my own hand.</strong></p>
					<p>And yet, the moment my brother entered his senior year at high school, my parents immediately set out to find him a job. A fervor they never displayed for me: fetching job applications, buying him fancy clothes for interviews, reminding him to follow up with people by phone. While I was able to fight with the bank's website interface to get my routing number for direct deposit, my brother struggled to read a sheet of paper telling him step-by-step how to set up a store-issued debit card. He didn't even try to decipher the words on the sheet, written in plain English, and just gave up until our parents coached him through the phone call with the automated system. If I had ever displayed such a lack of will, I would have been smacked (verbally, at the <em>very</em> least) into next Tuesday.</p>
					<p>And this is only of employment. To write of how the school system abandoned me but coddled my brothers every step of the way would take a whole other post on its own.</p>
					<p><strong>And yet I know I still need support.</strong> Even when working twenty-four hours a week and getting bonus pay on weekends, the maximum I could handle without quickly spiraling into another mental breakdown, I still couldn't make enough to dream of renting even the <em>shittiest</em> apartment in town, let alone have enough to buy food and miscellanea to keep me alive and save up money for the occasional inevitable emergency. I am told that "professional" jobs make more than fifteen dollars an hour, but the only entry-level job my professors seem aware exists in the tech industry to get experience is call center tech support. Which is out because I can't handle talking to disembodied voices... or being put on the spot... or dealing with the disposition of the stereotypical person who calls tech support in the first place. Barring a miracle, I've got nowhere to go after graduation other than to the same entry-level jobs at gas stations and restaurants and stores every other teenager and aimless adult is jockeying for in town.</p>
					<p>Am I... not worthy because I'm less independent than I thought I would be, and yet more than those who would otherwise help believe I should be when I tell them I am mentally disabled and need help? I am not <a href="https://mayvaneday.org/blog/2019/september/roophloch.html">"soiling myself, wreaking havoc, and breaking things"</a>, but I am still a far cry from a functional neurotypical adult. Am I supposed to struggle on without help until I die from the inevitable burnout, or diminish myself so that others will finally see me as worthy of assistance?</p><p>Some part of my heart tells me that this can't be the criteria. My lover clearly thinks I'm worthy enough to be taken care of by her on my bad days, and in the future we have planned, since we won't have to work for subsistence, I can throw all my <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spoon_theory">"spoons"</a> into properly caring for myself and honoring my brain's constant <del>desire</del> <em>mandate</em> to create instead of trying to balance my energy between the non-life of work and the non-life of recovering from work. Somehow she and I both see this future as a life worth living, a happy and joyous life, even if I need help sometimes. So the criteria must be something else.</p>
				</div>
				<hr>
					<div class="box">
						<p>I wake up the next day, post half-written. And again, and again, and again, allowing myself to slide back into hypnagogia after every task throughout the day. The sun glides across the sky in fits and stutters, just like my will, my motivation, untethered from work or school obligations.</p>
						<p>I open my RSS feed reader. There's a post at the top of the screen. <em>It's okay to be low-IQ,</em> it reads. <em>It's okay to be a follower. It's okay to not think. It's okay to not have a hobby or anything you're interested in. It's okay to accomplish absolutely nothing in life, do nothing, be nothing, become nothing.</em></p>
						<p>And I find it so revolting, so viscerally upsetting, that I have to resist the urge to puke all over the keyboard and end up breaking yet another one of my laptops.</p>
						<p>"I think I've found my criteria," I whisper to myself.</p>
						<p>I'm not buying the propaganda that says I have to "slow down". Even though I've managed to free myself from the <a href="https://mayvaneday.org/blog//2021/may/rebirth.html">"life purpose"</a> that demanded I make a piece of art far beyond my technical skills with no assistance whatsoever, there is still a voice in my head, an exhortation, to keep going and, at the very least, finish the book I'm working on before I die. Because <strong>what am I without the will to create?</strong> What am I without the words I build my mausoleum with? What kind of life would I have lived without pushing myself to do something sans the approval or assistance of my parents, with what feels like the whole of the world pushing back, demanding I crawl back into the cardboard box of mediocrity and stay there?</p><p>I look to my brothers for a guess, a potential example. I want to shake their shoulders, demand them to answer, "How do you live like this, never creating anything of your own volition? How does your soul survive only <a href="https://mayvaneday.org/blog/2020/february/consumeproduct.html">consuming</a>, myopic, too lazy to see there's a whole world beyond this ivory tower? Is there even a soul still in your body? <em>What are you allowing yourself to become?</em>"</p>
						<p>What am I, really?</p>
						<p><em>Nobody else has ever offered to give me a whole world before. Nobody else has ever thought me worthy of that kind of freedom.</em></p>
						<p><em>Even if I can't give you anything else? Another income, stability, a comfortable existence...</em></p>
						<p><em>Oh, Lethe...</em></p>
						<p>What am I, really?</p>
						<p><em>I am destined for greatness.</em></p>
						<p><em>What the hell is 'greatness'? <a href="https://mayvaneday.org/blog/2020/october/thelema.html">Who defines it?</a> Does it matter if some stranger is listening, if they approve?... I'm listening. You're already pretty great to me. Am I not enough?</em></p>
						<p>A life trying to be worthy enough for myself.</p>
					</div>
				</article>]]>
		</summary>
	</entry>
	
	<entry>
		<title>airborne</title>
		<link href="https://mayvaneday.org/poetry/a/airborne.txt" />
		<id>https://mayvaneday.org/poetry/a/airborne.txt</id>
		<published>2022-01-01</published>
		<summary type="html"><![CDATA[<article>
				<pre>
before, in your grief, you decree
"my life is over; there's no one left to be"
just remember how there's a world only you can perceive

stumbling through shattered nights as you pray
for a world solely yours where you'll finally be safe
and protected from coercion, christened Sablade

but of hell, ceasing pains, perdition terrified
"Mother, what will you do with my body when I die?
I've failed, been rejected, inept at this living I've been assigned."

reunited with your lover who swore to be your psychopomp
when arrives the fateful end of the Eschaton
you know intellectually that all should end alright
but still lingers some doubt, some expectation of blight

because all in your life has ended or will soon enough:
summer camp disbanded, work holding no love
despite the months poured in, the electronics that broke,
the remnants of childhood insisting it's time to go

and in six months, you'll finally from college graduate
having slipped by without a single accusation of hate
"Can you believe it? The worst is over. The end is near.
You'll make it out alive. Have faith in yourself, my dear."

you step back and consider the terrifying odds:
the only one in the heavens that wants a world without gods
is the girl you exchanged a part of your soul
with in Rainroom, an Outside away and a whole life ago

but to give her that world could mean Mori's bliss
and what's the point of it all if you can't also live
in the world you've created, that you swore on your life
you'd live together with her until the cessation of time?

dear child, you remembered your wings and recalled how to fly
but you're being chased to a cliff and the edge looms nearby:
will you prostate yourself and live in self-scorn?
or jump off the edge and trust you'll become airborne?
				</pre>
				</article>]]>
		</summary>
	</entry>
	
	<entry>
		<title>exhausted</title>
		<link href="https://mayvaneday.art/blog/2021/december/exhausted.html" />
		<id>https://mayvaneday.art/blog/2021/december/exhausted.html</id>
		<published>2021-12-17</published>
		<summary type="html"><![CDATA[<article>
				<p>I've taken up drinking lately.</p>
				<p>It's not as bad as it sounds. I'm not crumpled over my kitchen counter at three in the morning, chugging tequila straight out of the bottle to try to cope with my life. Just a splash of rum- I've tried all sorts of kinds of alcohol, courtesy of my mother, and I've found rum is the only one I can tolerate- in a wine glass of fruit juice mixed with ice to mask the rubbing-alcohol-esque scent. The proverbial kitchen counter is instead the dining room table, cleared of paperwork to be littered with weekly crafting supplies, and it's early evening instead of the middle of the night. The neighbors that live in the house behind us are over for craft night, and, even if not actually making anything myself, I'm sitting with them, with my mother, talking about life instead of holing up in my room finding new and creative ways to self-harm via the internet.</p>
				<p>One time I mentioned, the day after a huge wind storm, that I'd found their trampoline a block over on the way to work, and we spent ten minutes rolling it back to their yard in the pitch-black dark.</p>
				<p>One time we were playing with the neighbor lady's Cricut machine (a computerized vinyl cutter) and my mother, unprompted, cut out a heart with some of the spare golden iron-on vinyl and stuck it to the pocket of my black hoodie, the one she'd embroidered a small pixel art of my girlfriend on half a year ago, and giggled, "Someone must love you very much."</p>
				<p>Some times I even laugh.</p>
				<p>For a campaign of <strong>trying to reconcile with my parents</strong>, a last-ditch attempt to create a life I don't want to run away from, a buying of time for Jett to get done as much of her own college studies as possible before my eventual inevitable death and arrival in Sablade, it's not as painful as I thought it would be. Some part of me is beginning to believe that maybe I deserve a happy life after all.</p>
				<p>I'm exhausted.</p>
				<p>I'm tired of strangers on the internet calling me pathetic for not being able to convince my youngest brother to not be a misogynistic piece of shit. (Yes, because someone would <em>totally</em> listen to a person from a demographic they hate.) I'm tired of males on the internet acting homophobic or sexually predatory or otherwise uncomfortably "close" towards me and then not taking my resulting discomfort seriously. (There's a certain IRC channel, and its ringleader, I'm thinking of right now.) I'm tired of strangers on the internet emailing me in the middle of the night to ask me to do free labor for them, whether that's writing articles for them or helping shill their cryptobro-esque "web3" project using what little reputation I've managed to garner or consulting them on programming matters when I can barely hack together a Bash script myself without looking up every little thing on whatever search engine I'm using to mooch off Google that week.</p>
				<p>I'm exhausted.</p>
				<p>As I write this, I've finally made it to winter break in college. The semester will be over the minute before midnight tomorrow, and two of my classes end tonight. Unless I've somehow managed to bomb my research essay- I got an almost perfect score on the first two essays in the class, although they weren't weighted as heavily as this one will be- I've successfully finished what I hope is the last formal English class of my life. The months of my body waking me up at three in the morning on Mondays, where that week's English assignments had been published online right after midnight, to write <a href="https://mayvaneday.org/blog/2021/march/harmful.html">in ways I never would have done unprompted</a>, are finally behind me. I have two weeks to relax at home before I do the last two classes of my college career, one of them not even required for my degree: I needed six credits in spring semester to stay eligible for work-study, and the mandatory class was only three, so I took another one on. No working hectic business hours in a shitty retail store like I was a year ago, no dealing with entitled customers using essential workers as emotional punching bags, no obligations beyond what I put on myself and... whatever curveballs my family members throw my way come Christmas Day.</p>
				<p>And I'm <em>exhausted</em>.</p>
				<p>I've been trying to move as much as I can offline to give myself less and less incentive to flip the wireless switch on my ThinkPad to "on". (Well, if it wasn't half-disassembled in the corner of my room, its parts in a different laptop for the time being. I took a few tumbles off my bike one day on the way home from work, and the screen shattered. I'm waiting for a sale to order a replacement part, because I'm not spending <em>ninety dollars</em> on a new screen.) The last week I've spent several hours a day moving my, ah, "datasets" from Pinry, a self-hosted Pinterest, to <a href="https://hydrusnetwork.github.io/hydrus/">Hydrus</a>, a desktop application, since Pinry takes around <em>ten minutes</em> to reload a page of thumbnails after editing <em>one pin</em> due to the sheer amount of "data" I have in there. Hydrus, in comparison, takes about two seconds to load six times the amount of thumbnails on a page. As for other data, I've always preferred OsmAnd to Google Maps, and Kiwix is good... when the wikis I want are packaged for download or play nice with website scrapers to package my own <code>.zim</code> archives, and all of the games I want to play nowadays are offline anyway. I won't bore you with the details of the rest of my setup like so many other tech bloggers out there. <a href="https://archive.md/https://cheapskatesguide.org/articles/digital-fortress-of-solitude.html">This site a friend runs</a> details it all better than I care to anyway.</p>
				<p>Once my USB-to-SATA cable comes in the mail, I can resurrect my Raspberry Pi that's been languishing behind the family router and pull some more stuff off my server as well. I don't need RSS Bridge running with a public IP if I'm the only one using it. (I'd probably be rate-limited less on a residential IP, too.) I'd feel safer with my Tor/I2P/Yggdrasil/IPFS private keys physically at home, especially if I'm trying to force my way to a home life where I don't feel like I'm three steps from being made homeless at any given moment.</p>
				<p>And while I'm downsizing, I'd like to reduce my email addresses to one domain for both private and "public" life and just have everything else forward to it. Disroot's "donate once and get email hosting for life" offer looks pretty attractive compared to a subscription. <a href="https://codeberg.page">Codeberg</a> now supports custom domains for their static Git-based web hosting. It's all ultimately someone else's computer in the end, unless it's on my Raspberry Pi...</p>
				<p>Ah, maybe I <em>have</em> become one of those annoying tech bloggers after all.</p>
				<p>The less I am online and venturing outside my local WLAN, I've found, the more stable my mental health. Not because of "muh screen time!!1!" or any other reason you'll find on minimalist-worshipping blogs, but because, well, I have a tendency to self-harm using the unsolicited opinions of strangers who only know me in short bites of sound and disembodied snippets of text, if at all. <strong>I keep forgetting that the internet will continue to churn in a mass of gore and blood without me, that I don't have to pay attention to it, to <em>any</em> of it, to even care.</strong> I don't have to pay attention to drama between celebrities and obvious scams disguised as donation posts from strangers who've never created anything in their lives and Twitter's outrage of the week.</p>
				<p>I don't <em>want</em> to pay attention to it. But it's there everywhere I turn, unless I turn to the offline, unless I take drastic measures to keep myself offline as long as possible. I could continue working on <em>The Eschaton Eminence</em>, which will be my last book ever if I end up failing my mission to repair my home life and dying shortly after I graduate next year... or I could doomscroll on social media and have misogynists dogpile me in my notifications for daring to exist.</p>
				<p>I'm exhausted.</p>
				</article>]]>
		</summary>
	</entry>

</feed>