Males are violent and rapey.

I thought of a couple more potential recommenders, so I guess I'm going to continue to try winning the scholarship to study in Taiwan. I've messaged my ex and I intend to ask one of my dad's old girlfriends.

This morning I got in contact with a support person for the temp agency I applied to yesterday. I asked whether I needed to use the agency's smartphone app to apply for jobs. The support person's use of language was unprofessional and difficult to follow, but I understood that only manufacturing/light industrial jobs required use of the app. That's precisely the kind of job I applied for. Apparently there was supposed to be a popup directing me to use the app before I applied, but I never saw any such indicator. The kinds of browsers I use block a lot of garbage.

When I asked what would happen with the information and resume I'd uploaded, I was told that I'd have to wait to see whether a recruiter contacted me. Which honestly isn't clear because the website and the email I received suggested that I'd get no further attention until I filled out a profile via the app. Maybe I should have pressed for more details, but I was tired of the shitty communication and didn't want to waste too much time on the situation. I'll give it a couple of business days and perhaps call in the middle of next week. Nah, maybe Monday I'll call. The job I applied for is the sort to fill up quickly.

I've had some strange sort of stomach cramps for most of the day. It feels like a cross between ibs cramps and the kind of menstrual cramps I get now that I have fibroids. Dicyclomine, which I normally take for stomach cramps, didn't seem to have any effect. Fortunately the pain is not terrible nor very distracting.

I'm worried about my teeth. The fortified soy milk I'm using so much of is sweetened. I prefer the unsweetened kind but it costs double or more. The last time I ended up with a cavity, I'd spent the previous months regularly having cococonut sugar, something I don't normally have.

My liquid melatonin hasn't been working. I asked llm what could be the cause, and it mentioned the supplement having to be digested to be absorbed–my digestion issue come back to haunt me once again. I'd thought that a liquid version would be absorbed even more quickly than quick-dissolve tablets, which is what I normally use, but I was wrong apparently. I'd considered giving in and buying the tablets, but I really don't want to spend any more money, especially not to buy melatonin twice in one month. I asked llm what I could do and it suggested holding the liquid under my tongue for a short period of time. So tonight I held liquid melatonin under my tongue for one minute before swallowing it. It wasn't the easiest thing; swallowing is instinctual, so I had to focus on not swallowing.

I hope this works. Doing this every night will be a pain but at least it's free.

Today was moderately productive: I did laundry, tidied up my kitchen a little, exercised, found a new taiwanese mandarin podcast, got my ms-word-compatible software working and used it to start a work sample.

I also got advice from the llm about how to tweak my resume to qualify for a warehousing job that I'm not even sure I'd be able to get to. Maybe my time would be better spent working on my portfolio and trying to get jobs that are more in line with what I've done and want to do in terms of employment. I'm honestly afraid to go work in a warehouse. I feel like I'm morely likely to be harassed in the company of lower-class men, and that's the class of men most likely to have such jobs. Men have ruined my life.

Today was disgustingly hot even though the sky was overcast.

I had to fix my audio so I didn't get a chance to study rosetta stone korean. Tomorrow I should be able to get back to it.

I tried to watch a mandarin movie so that I could double my productivity while on the treadmill. I found a horror movie about a giant snake. I struggled to get the movie to load and then ended up closing the browser tab in a mix of disgust and horror within ten minutes of the movie's start because an early was focused on a skantily clad woman's body. I doubt that was even a chinese movie because the voices didn't seem to match the characters, but it's truly horrible to see other cultures birthing movies like the movies usians make.

I don't really know how I'm going to make it. I am traumatized. post-mood:hopeless

I had chocolate oats with dates and cranberries for dinner. It was wonderful. I added pecans, cashews, and walnuts to it.

No buses ran today so I did only my in-town shopping. Most of my shopping is in-town now that my diet has shifted to being largely made up of fruit, nuts, and seeds. I'm glad because hauling huge grocery loads into town, although a good workout, was a pain in the ass. From out of town I need only tofu, quick cook steel cut oats, carrots, broccoli, and some fruit. Maybe another bottle of the korean sauce I put on my tofu and in some of my soups. And I don't even need a huge load of tofu anymore; last month I bought twelve blocks and I just opened the twelfth package. I'm getting some of my protein from nuts and beans now, so I don't need as much tofu.

I shopped and walked for hours and hours this morning, then I did deadlifts when I came home, so I'm quite tired. That should help me sleep throughout the night but it probably won't.

post-mood:tired

I was super unmotivated to go out walking this morning. I wasted a couple of hours here in the apartment until I figured out that I needed some new podcasts, some new mandarin voices to listen to. So I downloaded four taiwanese mandarin podcasts. Three of the hosts have less than pleasant voices and the fourth inserts English translations, something I try to avoid at all costs, into her episodes. But I went out anyhow, much later in the morning than I usually go out, and everything turned out fine; I was able to listen to all four podcasts without my ears being seriously offended.

Unbelievably serendipitous discovery on my way home: a large bag of powdered magnesium supplement exclamation mark. Sitting in a neighbor's driveway, underneath a 'Free' sign stuck to the garage door, next to a bunch of apparently useless crap, including a stack of empty egg cartons. It's magnesium citrate, which isn't the best for sleep or for absorbing at all, but I can't be choosy. I had a huge dose just after lunch, hoping it would motivate a bowel movement, and now I have a stomachache. Oh well. As long as I sleep better.

I finally managed to start studying mandarin again today. I'm using logseq, a piece of knowledge management software that incorporates flashcards. I'm worried about the flashcard algorithm, however; I rated a bunch of cards 'Forgot' and they were immediately scheduled for tomorrow. I had never seem them before. I'm used to seeing flashcards over and over again until I indicate that I've remembered them. I've spent a lot of time getting this software to run and learning how to use it, and this is one more thing I'll have to figure out. If I cannot change the review algorithm, I'll have to continue my search for some other software. I also spent days working on an incremental read app called Incrementum. It turned out to be buggy plus there's no way to add audio to flashcards, so I ended up wasting all that time I spent on it.

I can't wait to get my September foodstamps allotment because I'm going to be having hot cereal with fruit for lunch and dinner. Sweets all day exclamation mark. Plus corn tortillas are only like sixty calories apiece so I'll be having little mini tostadas for some of my snacks. I love salsa and pico de gallo and I've been missing beans. I kinda miss peanut butter but it's so calorific that I'm not sure how to fit it into my diet.

The job search is on again and it's looking even grimmer than before with no dor funding.

post-mood: drowsy

I can finally use my desktop again. I'm not used to the way my new OS does things and I miss regular linux distros a little.

I've spent the whole day setting things up on the computer. Once I finally got my phone app working, I managed to get a same-day phone appointment with my clinic. I asked if the provider could prescribe the kinds of melatonin and magnesium I need so that my health insurance will reimburse me for buying them. She said there's no way to even specify powdered magnesium in the system.

I agreed to try some magnesium gummies, but there's no guarantee that they'll be reimbursed. I'm not sure that's even worth trying; the magnesium I can get from the amount of gummies that cost as much as my jar of magnesium will probably be less than what I can get from just buying the jar, and if it turns out that my insurance won't reimburse me, I'll have wasted money. I doubt gummies will even work because I'll probably need to digest them before I can absorb the magnesium. Absorption is always an issue. I also got a referral to gastroenterology to explore the absorption issue. They probably won't find anything wrong with me.

The phone call was very exasperating because I asked what might be causing me to not absorb things that are in tablet form, and the provider kept focusing on my low iron, which is not even an issue when I take liquid iron. I explained to her twice that I was asking about absorption in general and not iron in particular, and she said that she understood, but then went right back to talking about iron. It's scary when people in medicine act dumb or don't listen. I'm so damned tired of these medical providers. Most of the time they cannot help me anyways. I never even get to see an MD unless I go to a specialist. What happened to general practitioners? In primary care all I ever see are people with nursing degrees. They don't seem to know much and I trust them less and less.

Tomorrow I should be able to go back to my old routine of exercising in the early morning, studying mandarin in the late morning and after lunch, and searching for work in the afternoon. I'm trying to get started with an incremental reading app to take my mandarin to the next level. Flashcards alone are not cutting it because I'm reading through long transcripts and I need to see more context than what a single sentence per flashcard can give me. But I need to upgrade and reconfigure my system before I can run the software and upgrades take AGES on this OS. The devs really should warn people on the website.

According to the National Institutes of Health, "Extremely high intakes of magnesium can lead to irregular heartbeat and cardiac arrest." Interesting.

post-mood: frustrated

It's nine pm and my new os still isn't set up. I spent half the day just trying to log in. So today hasn't been very productive.

My neighbor's dog woke me up some time after six am. I was pissed. Other people's noise is catastrophic for me. One bark is all it took.

I knew I wouldn't get back to sleep and it was almost time to get up anyhow, especially after I'd laid there ruminating for a while. I took the opportunity to get out of town early enough to beat the afternoon public transportation crowd. The people on the bus in the morning are quieter.

I went to the dollar store for wet wipes and menstrual pads. I also bought some cheap almond milk, but I probably won't get the chance to use it because I'm running out of oats. I'm soooo sick of running out of food. At least this time I'm not really running out of produce. I've been eating more oats than usual because I crave sweets more and more. Now I want sweets for dinner as well as for lunch. Sweet 'n sour sauce on my tofu at dinnertime used to be enough; not anymore. Month after month, I've been cutting back on savory foods, and next month will continue that trend. I'm becoming the frugivore I tried and failed to become before.

My favorite way to eat now is oats, fruit, nuts, and soy milk for lunch and oats, cocoa, dates, nuts and soy milk for dinner. The choco oatmeal is tasty with coconut sugar but I try to avoid using processed sugar and sweeten with dates instead. But dates are expensive and it takes more of them by volume two sweeten. I've also found that I quite like having a few slices of yam for the small breakfast I have. Mid-morning I have a meager soup of a slice of tofu, veggies, and a few noodles. It's skipping breakfast without totally skipping breakfast.

I had a long time in between buses so I got a nice walk through town after I'd left the store. I managed to get to the bank for my monthly supply of quarters. I was glad because I hate going to my local branch every month. But the teller annoyed me so this trip to the bank wasn't great either. I wish I could interact with people less.

I've been doing well on one dose of magnesium and thirty mg of the low-quality melatonin I have left, so I don't need as much magnesium as I'd feared. What's strange is that the off-brand melatonin I usually get at the grocery store works better than the brand-name melatonin. I'm taking double the dose of the off-brand melatonin.

I want companionship tonight but that's likely because I don't have computer activities to distract me. An interesting-looking guy sat in front of me on the bus on my way home this afternoon. He had a nice skin tone, beautiful thick salt-and-pepper hair, and a complimentary pair of eyeglasses. I didn't get to see his face. Then he ran a hand over his head or through his hair and I saw how thick his fingers were, how thick his skin appeared to be.

This has happened quite a few times now, so it makes me wonder. But it isn't really anything new: I've always thought some men looked nice but felt unattracted upon closer inspection. And decades of testosterone really does a number on the human body. I've wondered whether I could only feel attracted to a young one. But probably not one of them either. Maybe I'm just too gay. Maybe I'm not in the headspace to be fully attracted to anyone. Maybe I need to know something about personality to feel stronger attraction. I don't know.

I feel a sense of emptiness or a sense of bereftness, like I'm lost or left beyond somewhere desolate when I think about the lack of connection with someone of my own sex. I don't think I'm missing it; I think I've not totally accepted the reality that I can't necessarily have it, that it's not as available as I used to think it was.

This I think is the core of my gayness: connection with my own sex. But too many female people are feminine beings before they are human beings. Meaning the gender role they've been socialized into determines who they are more than who they are determines who they are. Put another way, nurture trumps nature within them. And the nurturing diminishes them.

I like to have hot drinks in the evening, but I'm out of coconut sugar and cocoa, so no hot chocolate. I can't have tea because there's caffeine in it, and I have only gross tea flavors anyhow, plus tea without sweetener makes me hungry. Running out of groceries is just the worst.

I'm posting all this shit as I'm waiting for my computer to download seemingly every file on the internet.

Another victim.

I can't even call this a "beauty standard" because so many people know that this looks ridiculous rather than beautiful.

post-mood: disappointed

Today I went to an audiology follow-up appointment. I got the letter excusing me from jury duty. The doctor asked me how the hearing aides are working out and I said that I have not much use for them and mostly wanted them to help with foreign language learning. He told me that there isn't much research which indicates that hearing aides are helpful for auditory processing issues and that all the hearing aides he knows of connect by bluetooth. So I won't be able to plug any into any kind of audio equipment. We chatted for only a few minutes, then I left. There was nothing more to do.

Because I was there for so little time, I was able to catch the next bus going by. There was a guy sitting at the bus stop waiting. He said a few things to me, and the traffic was horribly noisy there, so I pulled out the damned hearing aides to see if they would be helpful. The doctor said they are for hearing voices in background noise. The hearing aides seem to amplify my voice, but they didn't amplify the guy's voice, so I put them away.

Very few people ride that bus, so the trip was peaceful, until a bunch of schoolkids got on much later.

Today was gross and uncomfortably hot, but I needed more menstrual pads, so I walked from the bus depot to the library. While I was there I checked my account balance and found that I owe a hundred and fourteen dollars. I turned in that book that got sauce spilled on it, but I'm not sure how much of the fines are about that book and how much are about the other books I haven't turned in for months.

Sweaty days and menstrual cycle days are a horrible combination.

I kept ending up next to men who smelled and it was gross. I went to sit on a nearby curb to get away from one guy who came to the bus depot bench I was on. When I got up, I found that my scraped-up knee had randomly started bleeding.

I got on the bus that takes me to my hometown and all was well; the young man who the seemingly high guy was talking to got off at the second stop so the seemingly high guy soon shut up and the ride was quiet. I had finally gotten around to brushing up on my French grammar on the previous bus, and I was finishing the chapter on adjectives. Five minutes away from town, another horrible thing from my past occurred to me and I wanted to be dead right there on the spot. The second womon I dated abused me, but the abuse turned out to be more warped than I'd previously thought. I was stunned at the level of sickness and sociopathy revealed to me.

After I disembarked and stopped for some coconut sugar, I waited for the bus going in the opposite direction so I wouldn't have to walk in the heat anymore. The stop is on the noisy main street, the wait was long and unpleasant, I was miserable and trying to deal with my life being over. I don't exactly want to die but I cannot take psychological agony forever. Every single day, I wake up depressed and disappointed because I have to live another day with my memories. Waking up is the worst part of the day.

I should have been aborted. My mom was on birth control but my sociopath of a father convinced her to stop taking it. Now I'm stuck with this unbearable decision of whether to keep living in continual misery or to end my life prematurely. I'm at peace only when I'm sleeping. I want sleep to never end, and I want to stop waking up unhappy. This is why I want a suicide method that will take me while I'm unconscious.

I don't really have any more energy to seek work, so I guess that's the end of my plans to get to Taiwan. If I can think of a place where my body won't be found, I can start making some more solid plans to end this. It's so damned difficult to get away from people, even in death.

I lost all my lives in duolingo again. I hope I'm finally done with that time-wasting garbage. I usually keep it open in a tab so I can do a quick lesson whenever each day. I closed that tab. I started doing Rosetta Stone Korean again this evening. Now that I know more Korean grammar, extracting the vocab for memorization is much easier. Without being interrupted by lost lives, this should be a much smoother study method. But I won't get far in Korean if I die.

Giving up on Korean feels like the most difficult part of suicide. I'm not fully ready to give up on everything. But I need to be. I want to be. No, I don't really need to be ready. Pulling the trigger without thinking kills just as well. And stopping thinking is precisely what I need.

transportation

Things are not going well. I cannot convince myself to accept the indignity of having been harassed, touched against my will, and called a misogynistic slur, especially given that womyn were responsible for some of this. So I guess I can't go on living. I don't see any other option. I thought womyn at least were trustworthy, but I was oh so wrong.

I'm becoming non-functional. I can't accomplish as many things in a day. Maybe my life will start falling apart and then

post-mood: sad

Another day, another random migraine. I don't know what's happened. I tried to wait until my usual dinnertime but my body wanted food sooner, and a snack wasn't enough, apparently. I had half a dinner plus ibuprofen and migraine meds at six-thirty and my head is still hurting. An hour later, it's time for spicy bbq baked tofu and steamed broccoli.

Crickets behind my apartment complex have been chirping so loudly at night that I can no longer sleep with my bedroom window open. That's ok because I've been too cold to keep it open all night. I'm taking my iron supplements again and I'm still cold.

I'm continually assailed by disturbing memories and I feel too broken to accomplish much of anything. I'm good at clicking through duolingo, though. Sometimes I have an intrusive memory while I'm doing a lesson and I then choose the wrong answer. I ran out of lives recently and started considering quitting again because being forced to stop lessons by duolingo accepting an answer sometimes and not other times is super demotivating. Practice sessions earn me only one extra life, which I sometimes lose shortly afterwards with another error.

Today I looked into joining freelancing platforms, but most of them are scammy and low-brow and will likely end up being a waste of time.

Dinner wasn't enough; I needed more grease so I had another half-taco baked in soybean oil.

My diet is going downhill. Because I cannot stomach all the lemon/lime water I need to stay hydrated, I get some of my fluids via hot cocoa. But unsweetened cocoa tastes bad and I cannot afford low-calorie sweetener, so I've been adding coconut sugar. A teaspoon here and there is adding up day by day. On top of that, I have no motivation to get on the treadmill nor go out for a walk. I manage to get on the spinning bike a few times a week only because it improves my mood and helps me sleep. If I don't change my habits, I'm going to start gaining weight, and then I'll really be depressed.

Fortunately, I've found that several slices of sweet potato and yam are more satisfying than the slice of tofu and broccoli I've been having for my snack between lunch and dinner, so replacing one with the other has cut out some calories I think.

I feel like I'm getting closer to being ready to suicide but it doesn't feel the way I thought it would feel. It's like I'd envisaged getting some place through the front entrance and ended up coming in through the back: the path is unfamiliar, I'm disoriented, I'm not sure where in the structure I'll end up or what I'll have to do to get to where I want to be once I'm inside. I feel an almost indescribable sense of grief and bottomless resentment that my life has been destroyed and I'm basically powerless to improve it. I'm forever psychologically damaged whether I leave this country or not, whether I get a job or not. So why bother?

I now recognize some of the things I experienced in my youth as expressions of hatred. I had no clue how utterly hateful people could be. It's so so foreign. So I didn't even defend myself. I didn't know what was happening. The disgust I feel at having been subjected to this treatment is as strong as what one might feel at the thought of tasting someone else's vomit. That describes it quantitatively, but not qualitatively. I don't know how to describe it qualitatively. Probably anyone who's been the victim of a hate crime or seen a deliberately degrading depiction of whatever marginalized minority they're a part of knows what I'm talking about.

Sometimes I remember abused people who killed themselves, like the singer of Linkin Park or that Jeffrey Epstein victim who suicided this year. These people know what's up. There's no recovery from this shit. The fact that the mental health community acts as if there is recovery is borderline offensive. Even if the specific abuse itself isn't bad enough or can be forgotten, the fact that things like this happen at all, and to children, is so profoundly warped that one wonders whether this world is something one even wants to live in. It's like living in an alternate realm of absurdities, where nothing makes sense. You try to walk downstairs and end up on the ceiling. You can't predict anything, so there's no way to plan anything, no way to get what you want. There's no way to live in that universe.

My participation in the ptsd study was rejected. I am concerned that the researcher is letting down people with certain kinds of ptsd.

post-mood: despondent