This morning I watched (most of) a movie called 65. It was incredibly stupid. The premise is that explorers from a space-faring civilization crash-landed on Earth 65 million years ago. But the explorers were or at least appeared to be human. And some of them spoke modern English. With contemporary curse words even. The English-speaking pilot and a non-English-speaking passenger, a girl, were the only survivors. All throughout the movie, the pilot kept speaking to her in English even though she clearly didn't understand. The few English words she did pick up, she picked up unrealistically quickly and easily, with very good pronunciation and zero practice.

It occurred to me that even if the producers of this movie had had the budget, the will, and the technical skill to make the film realistic, they wouldn't have done so. A realistic film would have involved a non-human race communicating in (not necessarily speaking) an alien language. The USian audience, many of whom cannot even relate to their compatriots, probably wouldn't have been able to relate to non-human protagonists (which is apparently important for normies consuming fiction) and probably wouldn't have gone to see a film that had no humans in it. Considering how much it would have cost, the realistic version probably wouldn't have made financial sense. Aside from lack of moviegoer interest, there would have been practical problems such as communicating pain, fear, and relief through alien physiognomy and showing comprehensible injuries to alien biology.

Realistic sci-fi either has to be relatively simple or is mostly for fans like me. Fans who really care about the "science" aspect of "science fiction." Fans who expect scientific realism. This is at least one reason why sci-fi is better off as a literary genre; the written word allows creators to add explanation and description that would be clunky, expensive, or impossible in films.

The prospect of a pristine Earth with no human inhabitants made me ache with longing (the prehistoric fauna, not so much). The Earth must have been gorgeous back then. It still is in some places, but I rarely get to see that in person. No ugly, barren highways, no traffic roar, no involuntarily overheard conversations on a goddamned smartphone.

Ok, it's a quarter past eleven pm now. I got my anti-depressant and the list of side effects is scary. Why do so many anti-depressants cause suicidal thoughts? (not that I'm scared of that one). It's like some kind of dark irony. As is the possible "severe constipation or stomach pain," the very symptoms I'm taking this to prevent. Hair loss, enlarged breasts, nipple discharge, and seizures. I'm not so keen on taking this anymore. I think I'll take half the pill and see how I feel tomorrow. I'm taking it mainly because I'm desperate to sleep more than my usual five hours so that I can finally have a bowel movement and not be exhausted. However, I'm afraid it'll leave me groggy all day. I asked the doctor for a super low dose but I'm going even lower than that. I'm sensitive to drowsiness-causing drugs. Yet none of them ever put me to sleep. Another dark irony. I'm not even sure what "irony" means. Maybe I used to know.

I also got a refill on my migraine medication. Too bad I didn't have it yesterday, when I had the actual migraine. Small miracle: I managed to take a short nap (something I can almost never do) this morning, and that's when the migraine finally started to disappear.

I have a tightness in my body that's been with me for hours. I feel it most in my chest and upper back, and, secondly, in my abdomen. I ache. It's like I can't relax my body, like I'm stuck in a stressful and defensive posture.

This afternoon, I watched a movie called Knock at The Cabin. I checked it out from the local public library.

After I'd brought it home, I thought at first, 'why would you watch this, it'll just put you in a bad mood?' (the movie is about a family being held captive in their home by four armed strangers). Today, however, my feet were hurting so bad that I could no longer work at my standing desk. My second computer doesn't have enough RAM for me to do much of anything with it and my third has a dead network card, so I had to stop my online activities.

So I sat down with my third computer, the DVD, and two packs of frozen food, one for each foot. Fortunately, the movie was not terribly violent or disturbing. However, the ending, the choice the main characters made, kind of irritated me. The ending was not happy.

Maybe the movie bothered me more than I'd taken account of, or maybe today was just the culmination of stress and misery, but, shortly after the movie ended, after I'd stopped shivering from icing my feet for like forty-five minutes, I was close. I went to the kitchen drawer and pulled out the box cutter. I extended the blade from the red plastic and thought about what I'd do with it. I looked at my wrist and the blue veins visible beneath the skin. I thought about how I'd handle the pain and noted that I almost didn't care. I thought about nurses struggling to hit my veins half the time when I go to give blood samples. I thought about something I saw online once years ago, an image that counseled people to cut the wrist in a certain direction, presumably for a successful suicide. "Down the line," not "across the row," it had said, a black and white image with text, a wrist, and a razor.

I wasn't able to pull myself out of my mood like I have been, and it felt nearly unbearable. That's when my bodily aches started. The physical pain was sharper than my emotions. Emotionally I reached the point of feeling like I'd just had enough and didn't want to bother anymore. It wasn't terribly emotionally intense. I decided I would try for just a bit longer, and I put the box cutter back into the drawer, feeling something like defeat.

I looked up suicide info online. I was half-heartedly searching for "things to do before you kill yourself," but I got no good results. Inevitably, suicide prevention bullshit showed up in the search results. This stuff is always useless. Mostly it just says to call a suicide prevention hotline. Maybe it's useful to neurotypicals; everybody seems to think that social interaction helps dispel suicidality. I would be less suicidal if I could have less social interaction. Interaction with other people is apparently magic for normies. It would do nothing for me. Actually, it would provoke anger that might distract me. I found one suicide link for "neurodivergent" people. The web page just defined neurodivergence and said to call suicide prevention. Low-effort.

The really annoying thing about the suicide prevention crap is that suicidality is generally presented as a symptom of mental illness. It's kind of victim-blamey, as if life can't be bad enough to provoke suicidality without an accompanying mental illness. None of the horrible things in the world that could conceivably make a person suicidal are ever addressed. It's all very generic and sort of something-is-wrong-with-you-not-the-world.

I didn't know what to do with myself at that point. Since missing workouts feels bad, I decided to force myself to do my scheduled workout. I had to work up to it after I first had the thought; couldn't manage it right away.

I've forced myself to do workouts under shitty circumstances before. Migraines, for one. Lifting through the fatigue I felt last winter was probably the most difficult. This was the second or third most difficult.

So I did my workout and then I rushed to shower, dress, and catch the local shuttle because today is food bank day and I'm running out of food because my diet is expensive. I missed the shuttle and had to walk across town. It was unpleasant but not terrible, probably thanks to the icing. I was hoping I'd get some fruit but the best I got was applesauce and a bag of raisins. Better than nothing. Craving fruit and not being able to afford any is horrible.

If I could just get away from people, at least for a while, it would really help me. But society is set up so that only people with money can easily be alone.

I did my first wide-grip chinup today. The first wide-grip pullup is going to be a while yet. I'm having to start from scratch with pullups because they require forearm strength (of which I have little), whereas chinups are proceeding quickly because I already had some bicep development.

I am rekt and super tired. Oddly, my feet are the sorest. I guess it's because I've been on my feet for most of the day, playing a computer game at my standing desk.

Last night, I watched a sci-fi movie called Stowaway. It was one of the most unrealistic sci-fi movies I've seen in a long time.

First of all, they sent a student on a two-year mission. To freaking Mars. With a crew of only two other people. What?? Then someone from the launch crew got stuck behind a panel and ended up an accidental stowaway. As meticulous as people working space missions have to be, nobody from the rest of the crew noticed that someone who had actually boarded the ship was missing at launch time? Stupid! Then the crew (the grad student and a research scientist) needed to do some climbing to get oxygen from another part of the ship. And the scientist was out of breath and barely able to do the job! Out-of-shape people don't get sent on space missions!

Today I went to the grocery store for some more applesauce. I of course always buy the unsweetened applesauce. Plain applesauce is sweet enough by itself, and why waste calories on added sweetener, is the way I see it. I tend to dislike the taste of sweetened fruit anyhow. I use the applesauce in my beloved protein powder meals. Since I've been thinking about adding cinnamon to this dish, I looked at the cinnamon applesauce, which I usually ignore. The cinnamon applesauce is sweetened (albeit with apple juice rather than straight up refined sugar). Why? What is it about adding cinnamon made someone decide to add apple juice as well, I wonder. It's weird to process apples into applesauce and then add apple juice to it.

The line at the store was too long, so I ended up getting my cinnamon applesauce from another store. This cinnamon applesauce was unsweetened and cost less. Score. And there was almost no one in line in front of me.

My calves seem to have grown. I really do not appreciate this. Calves are one part of the body I very much do not want bigger. I have been avoiding working out my legs so that they won't get any bigger. However, I've been riding my spinning bike more often and for longer; that may be the reason for the growth. I've been trying to ride with the lowest resistance that is comfortable so that I get more cardio than leg muscle development, but that lowest resistance has been increasing, probably because my calves are getting stronger.

The body parts I want to grow are growing little or not at all, and the body parts I want to slim down are the ones that grow the most easily. It's a curse.

I was supposed to be using this blog to post about feminist stuff, but my mental health has been so bad that I'm loathe to put myself in the negative head space necessary to type what's been on my mind vis-a-vis how shitty the world is thanks to men. I've been playing video games all day to keep myself occupied, and it's worked well. I've also made a lot of progress in a game that I was stuck on; I completed the entire fourth world of Road to Gehenna despite never having even seen it before today. I still have no idea how to finish the second world, however.

I've had to decrease my cardio; I was getting too hungry. As of yesterday, I'm doing twenty-five minutes per day on the spinning bike instead of forty-five. I probably would have run out of the music I need to make it through forty-five minutes of spinning and ended up petering out on the cardio anyhow.

My back has finally started to feel significantly better. I'm no longer worried about having injured myself. It feels best when I exercise, especially when I'm spinning (provided I don't set the saddle too high). Interesting.

My sleep improves for one night, then I get a couple nights of hardly any sleep at all. It's crazy-making. I finally called the sleep medicine department. I was given an appointment three weeks in the future. That's a long time to wait when one is not sleeping. What's worse is that the appointment is in the morning. I asked for another time and was told that all the appointments are in the morning. Just a little inconvenient and disappointing for a department that serves the kinds of patients who struggle with mornings.

I'm afraid that I'm not losing any weight, but I may just be losing so slowly that I can't tell. My scale is a piece of crap and probably wouldn't accurately pick up fractions of a pound of weight loss even if it weren't used. The number went down by three pounds and stayed that way for two or three days; then it went back up to my starting weight. It doesn't help that I'm always bloated thanks to IBS, and apparent even more bloated now that I'm eating a high-fiber diet.

I seem to look slimmer, but...I don't know.