Thirty dollars for my six-month supply of vitamin d3. The bottle I get is a large expense for one month but it comes out to be the cheapest option because it lasts so long.

I also routinely buy vitamin b12, two kinds of melatonin, and magnesium. Fortunately, I think I can do without re-purchasing those this month. I'm also trying l-theanine as a sleep aid this month. The chocolate bars I take for caffeine/energy are also basically a kind of supplement. I really need to budget for those this month. I don't expect my sleep to get any better (so I'll still need caffeine for energy), and they can help with my diet.

I finally got a working humidifier. Someone was giving away an ancient one for free a couple of blocks away. (People give away such great stuff here. I've gotten computer monitors, a flat-screen TV, and tons of free produce.) I've found that old stuff is often a better value than newer stuff. Newer stuff is built cheaply, made of plastic, breaks quickly. All kinds of manufacturing is about making as much money as possible, not about quality. I have an old CD player and tape player, stuff I bought used from a thrift store, that still work long after the much newer mobile phones stopped functioning.

So I decided that grabbing this vaporizer/humidifier, as it says on the box, might be a good idea. And it was: It's warm here now even though the heating is off. Too bad I didn't have this earlier in the winter; my heating bill is now over a hundred dollars past due. The water tank is made of glass; most modern humidifiers are made of plastic. Something as sturdy as glass would cost a lot nowadays.

I also bought some squalene along with the vitamin d3. I'm expecting the squalene and the more humid air to improve my skin, help me recover from pih faster, and help me recover from any future skin peels without pih.

My enthusiasm for Mandarin is waning as I settle into the repetitive and time-consuming routine of absorbing new vocabulary. My textbook is better than Pimsleur, but I'm still learning not-very-useful terms such as water heater. I don't think I will be able to learn Cantonese or any other Chinese language any time soon because they all use the same script. I would be continually getting them confused with Mandarin. And one of the addons I'm using with the software I edited now has a strange bug that I don't know where to begin to fix. I am mentally exhausted with all the things I've done and time I've spent trying to force this software to conform to my study routine.

I looked up escaping the United States today and ended up on the Peace Corps' website via Reddit. They have job openings in Vietnam, so I took a look at the information they have about the country. The very first sentence indicated that mobile phones are ubiquitous. Great. Where do I have to go to escape these goddamned phones? Syria?

I don't even like to be seen pulling out the mobile phone I have, but it helps me continue to study while I'm out getting sunlight, which helps me sleep more deeply. That and profile pictures are the only things I use it for. It takes forever to start up, it's awkward to hold, and the menus and things are a pain in the ass to navigate.

I can't work the Peace Corps jobs anyhow. They are super strict about their volunteers conforming to local customs to integrate, to get the locals to trust them. For the job in Nepal, at least, they even require volunteers to live with a Nepalese family. I would never sleep again if I had to share a home with other people. It would be unbearable. I hear the air in Nepal is so bad that people are constantly hawking and spitting to clear their throats. Jesus Christ. Maybe that's just in the main city though? The job in Vietnam is a teaching position, and I don't have the energy to interact with people all day, whether students or a host family.

And I absolutely do not want to help spread English around the world. I don't like this capitalistic monoculture the world is moving towards, and I do not want to help create more developing countries to which first-world corporations can easily export jobs.

Maybe I should just transfer my housing voucher to SF county and live in or near one of the Asian enclaves. That way I won't have to deal with annoying American social overtures, I'll have a better chance of finding a boyfriend in person, and maybe I can practice my Mandarin. I'll still come across the insane, sidewalk-shitting homeless population when I travel across the city, but maybe not so much in my own neighborhood. But finding a place will be difficult. Everyone wants to live in SF.

California almost seems like a nice place when I think of it as a whole, but, when I zoom into the city level, there's no town here where I actually want to live. There's no town in this whole goddamned country where I actually want to live. I have to choose between relative quiet and safety plus liberal white racism on the one hand, versus more ethnic diversity/fairness plus more crime, filth, noise, and decay on the other hand. Oh, now I remember why I wanted to move to Taiwan. It's just looking so impossible.

If my sleep hasn't improved after a month of progesterone and the audiologist cannot help me manage my noise sensitivity, I'll re-evaluate my plan. I'll have to plan for long-term disability.

Trump has done some interesting things since taking office. He has taken steps to remove men from womyn and girls' sports and eliminate transition-related medical procedures for minors. His memorandum on the later issue indicates that the WPATH guidelines should be re-evaluated. I'm still waiting on him to do something about the men in womyn's prisons issue. There was something about increased investing in American citizens and targeting the increasing cost of living. It's too bad it took a damned felon to do this shit.

One stupid thing he's doing is renaming the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America. Just what the hell.

I'm tired of fighting this ear piercing that will not heal. I'm going to have to switch to a hoop earring.

I missed food bank day again. I went to get blood drawn again instead. I want to get my medical issues resolved ASAP (however, my chronic sense of coldness isn't as pressing now that I have the humidifier). I was too tired to deal with the noise and bustle of the food bank anyhow.

Seeing people outdoors in cold weather with open-toed shoes bothers me.