Some sort of update messed up my boot process, so I had to spend three or four days troubleshooting. I didn't know that I could use a gui as the root user, so I spent the first two or three days trying to find solutions online via an agonizingly slow and difficult-to-navigate text-based browser. Once again forced to learn new things about linux.

My new shoes arrived yesterday and they are amazing. They are so light, wearing them almost feels like wearing nothing but socks. My feet feel naked in them. I feel so free it's almost disturbing, like I'm subconsciously expecting to hurt my foot because I'm walking outdoors shoeless. I was afraid they would look ugly; the website photo didn't do them justice. But they are pretty much just what I like: low-key, relatively inconspicuous, the type of shoe that can go with almost any outfit.

These new shoes have probably the thinnest sole I've ever walked in, so I was afraid the lack of padding would lead to my feet hurting more. Today was only my first day taking them for a long walk, but my feet don't hurt as much as they usually do. The track has been locked for days (I don't know why), I've been walking on asphalt mostly, but my feet are doing ok. This is one of the best purchases I've ever made.

Without any practical internet access, I felt disconnected. I'm surprised I'm not more behind in terms of Mandarin flashcards. I got tired of playing a computer game and re-watched the movie The Cloverfield Paradox. The stupid bits of movies are always so much more obvious on re-watching. The space team's environmental engineeer somehow had a security override key that allowed him to 3d-print a gun. He wasn't shown stealing the key or anything. He just had it.

Those super-doses of coffee I was taking really did a number on my libido. My sexual interest in men has receded now that I'm having a sane amount of coffee each day, and I'm both relieved and disappointed. They've begun to look grosser again, albeit not as gross as before. Maybe not so much gross as alien. My goodness, their skin is so thick, one wonders whether their tactile sensitivity is muted.

But I'm still not a lesbian, and I don't think I ever will be. One might say I never was, but then we'd get into unanswerable questions about whether the potential for attraction, albeit as yet unrealized, determines one's sexuality. It is life experience (or, more particularly, social experience) that has made the mind more important than the sex of the body for me...no, that's not quite accurate: it's more like, the mind determines whether whatever physical attraction exists can be strong enough to sustain a relationship. I could not have felt this way when I was younger because I didn't have the experience that underpins the feelings. But I can't even really speak on this with authority yet, not until I have yet more experience.

Curiously, what is most exciting is thinking about guys touching me. I'm not that interested in touching them. I like to cuddle, and they are so hard. Womyn are soft. But with womyn it's almost the opposite: I'm more interested in touching them than them touching me. But that's probably mostly because I hardly ever come across one that really suits me. Effeminate people touching me is not arousing.

What I really want is an ethical vegan. Almost nothing is more attractive. I remember watching a clip of some awards show, Joaquin Phoenix went up on stage to accept an award and started talking about animal welfare, he INSTANTLY became more attractive.

Speaking of veganism, I'd been thinking about getting a vegan-related tattoo to promote ethical veganism, but I gave up on the idea because I was going to try to move to Taiwan, where most people wouldn't be able to read the tattoo. Of course I could try to get one in Chinese, but it would be decades before I trust my knowledge of Chinese enough to get a tattoo in that language. I wouldn't get a tattoo in a language I'm not fluent in because I wouldn't know for sure what it says, all the possible interpretations and connotations.

This blog is boring because I have, as they say, no life. Or at least, not much of one. I'd say I have half a life. No, just over half. Sixty to seventy percent of a life. Unless we consider continual struggles with health and money to be life. Which they are, but, that's not really what people mean when they talk about having a life, and thinking of those things as my life is depressing as hell. Having a life is about having a career (or school at least) and a social life. Stuff like hobbies are in there too.

I am trying to get "a life." Last week, I asked my VA primary care provider for a referral to yet another veteran's employment program, one that specializes in veterans with significant barriers to employment. They have a sheltered employment program and they even pay a wage. Hopefully Trump hasn't defunded it.

I just started my derma medication again yesterday. It will do something, but I suspect it won't do enough. Either my skin won't look good until I get to Taiwan or it won't look good until I have enough money for a trip to Sacramento. Maybe I should have used my new credit card to stay in Sacramento for a few days. Motels are so expensive though, I probably wouldn't have been able to afford to stay long enough. Plus I wouldn't be able to sleep at all.

I'm afraid that I've permanently damaged my digestive system. My problems with chronic hypoglycemia didn't start until university. I wasn't taking care of myself, and, even though I'm doing much better now, it's not good enough. If the endocrinologist cannot give me some insight, I'll be stuck like this for life, probably unable to reach my weight goal. I'm continually having to eat when I do not want to.

I'm back on vitamin b6, so my energy levels should be more normal from now on. I run out of supplements and then sometimes forget to buy more because I don't have the money at the time I run out, then I get bogged down in fatigue and brain fog. B6 is excellent for energy so I should definitely be on it regularly.

Today was a good day. I got a decent amount of sleep, I was reasonably energetic after I got up, my morning workout was productive, and I wasn't horribly drowsy afterwards.

It seems that I sleep better with no electronics in the bedroom. I suspected this before, and my sleep improved once I moved my alarm clock out of the bedroom, but I need to know the time when I wake up (always too early) so that I can decide whether to get up or try to get back to sleep, so I bought a second alarm clock and had it in the bedroom up until last night, when I had the best night's sleep I've had in a while.

I finally got another dermatology appointment today, so countdown until my next skin treatment and until my pih FINALLY fades entirely. I thought I could do it myself with skin peels, but I guess I was wrong. I've wasted a whole year waiting for my skin to improve.

I got a Spanish-language book about Korean. Spanish non-fiction is so much easier for me to read than fiction. I feel like my Spanish literacy is super low when I try to read fiction. Well, I guess it is super low; given that reading non-fiction is facilitated by the many words that are similar to their English equivalents, non-fiction is perhaps not the best measure of literacy, not for a native English speaker anyhow.

'Why do you care about other people's bodies?' That's a question I see whenever the topic of overweight Americans comes up online. Well if they're just a bit chubby, I don't care. But if a significant subset of the population is so large that it impacts their health, that's A. depressing because it's clearly (visually) abnormal, it's a sign of a garbage culture, and they're going to suffer and suffer needlessly, and B. they're that much less likely to attend to their responsibilities, such as their jobs, raising their kids, etc. which we as a nation all rely on each other to do. It's no different than shitloads of people being ill or injured; it's just sort of a slow motion version.

And then there are less salient things, like nurses getting injured trying to care for their morbidly obese patients. Or maybe those are just stories. Probably not.

Shit. Just got off the phone with my sister. Her shady apartment management raised the rent with a couple weeks notice and she just left because she couldn't afford it. Now she's blowing her money on a motel. And our piece of shit mother, after leeching off her for years, suddenly up and got a job so that she could move into senior housing. She's working towards abandoning my sister to homelessness instead of staying to help her pay for the motel or a new apartment. What a trash human being.

I hope I won't be up all night because of that B6. I cannot remember the dose I used to take, and there have been several occasions on which I had too much and did not sleep. Idiots put it in sleep medication now.

I don't like to think about how regular working people survive here in the bay area. Rent is so damned expensive. It's depressing.

Hooray, I am going to receive assistance with my energy bill, and they're going to pay about a hundred and fifty dollars more than I owe. So I won't have to pay that bill for another two or three months at least. I use hardly any electricity in spring and summer.

I tried searching for gay womyn and intersexed people on my two autism dating sites. One set of results indicated that no such people even exist on the site, the other gave me a list of incompatible people, most of whom hadn't been online in years anyhow. It honestly kind of bothers me to look at many womyn now, especially the ones who wear makeup or have their eyebrows shaved off. It's become almost like looking at men with hairy faces: bizarre and sort of unnatural, except the makeup and drawn-on eyebrows actually are unnatural, unlike the facial hair. I cannot see what people really look like with hair hiding a portion of their faces, so I don't get much pleasure from looking at womyn.

I used to want to date lesbians exclusively, but I don't think that strategy would work anymore. I think most of them also want to date lesbians exclusively. Oh well, whatever. The lesbians I wanted to date seem to not really exist after all, not in any great numbers anyhow. I don't really want to date bisexual womyn either, though. Nothing has changed with regards to the fact that I still want to date someone who has a sexuality similar to mine, so unless I come across a bisexual womon who's interest in men doesn't extend beyond east Asians and maybe a few Latino guys, I'll still feel unable to relate to her and therefore unattracted. Grossed out even. Actually, none of this shit even matters because there are no gender role non-conforming womyn to date regardless of whom they find attractive. This is not a good use of my time. But heteroflexibles I don't really trust, pansexuals I'm not interested in because they're into gender identity shit, so homoflexible or someone with no sexuality label would probably be my best bets.

The first thing I'm going to get when that check arrives is a new shipment of supplements. The supplement I took yesterday did not put me to sleep. The second purchase is gonna be a few new clothing items. My wardrobe is awful and I need some new underwear. Some 100% cotton socks would probably help me finally heal from my constant foot fungus, if the white flesh in between my toes actually is a foot fungus. So maybe more than a "few" items of clothing. The third thing is laser hair removal for my neck. Then if I have enough left I will consider an investing consultation. But first I can read a beginner's book on investing.

Today I'm a little drowsy even though I had dark chocolate bars, but the drowsiness is not nearly as bad as it has been. I'm glad I had the clearness of mind to get off that damned medication. It took me months of foggy brained misery to recognize that I needed to decrease my melatonin dose.

I had the best orgasm this morning watching Asian guys solo on Xvideos. I started watching these kinds of videos when I was a teenager, but they've taken on a whole new dimension all these years later because I was never attracted to any of the guys in the videos before. I just watched pretty much whoever showed up on the web pages; usually it was europale guys and occasionally hispanic guys. I didn't really look at it that way though; I never cared or paid much attention to what ethnicity they were, just that they didn't look too gross.

Ah, but now. The simple act of typing "asian" into the search bar has opened up a whole new world. I no longer tolerate headless crotch shots because a large part of the enjoyment comes from seeing how handsome they are. I used to be totally grossed out by ejaculation and would stop the videos before they got to that point. I still am grossed out by it to some extent, but if it's more liquid than chunky, more transparent than white, more squirting than than seeping, and more flying off-camera than stubbornly clinging to or dangling from something, it's ok. Better than ok, it can be exciting, as I found out today. Because it's a sign of sexual enjoyment.

I wasn't a fan of muscles before but they are starting to grow on me. I felt something like fear or aversion when I saw muscular chests because my immediate inclination is to view them like I view breasts, which I'm guessing most guys would not appreciate, and I was bothered by the thought of possibly alienating one of them. But I guess we'll find out when we cross that bridge, said bridge consisting of me doing with muscles the same things I like to do with breasts. It might be better because of the firmness. Breasts that are too fatty tend to warp in shape under pressure and so it can be difficult to get one's mouth around them comfortably.

My skin is looking nice. At the library, I happened upon a book on Korean skincare and started setting up a new skincare routine based on what I'd read (I'm not done because I need to buy a couple more products). The biggest change is that I now put oil on my face. I'd tried this before, when I tried the oil cleansing method, but it broke me out and I didn't have the money or patience to try different oils. I tried it again more recently, using oils I found on online non-comedogenic scales. I think I broke out anyways and/or didn't see much improvement. I lost faith in those scales and gave up again.

This time, the key difference seems to be that I'm putting the oil on right before I wash with soap (rather than leaving it on my face) and not applying the oil to my forehead (where I tend to break out). My face is softer and my pores are smaller and cleaner. I'm using almond oil because that's what I have (and because it's supposed to be non-comedogenic, which is why I was willing to try it at all), but I might try jojoba oil instead when I get some money. If jojoba oil weren't so expensive, that's what I'd have bought instead of the almond oil; the former is supposed to be the oil closest to the oil or oil-like substance (sebum?) produced by human skin. I still have some discoloration, but it'll fade with time; I don't really feel the need to do any more skin peels. They're too risky here.

Today has been a good day, but I wasted time because I lacked focus. I need to work on increasing my productivity. Because I won't be sleeping a full night any time soon, I also need to work on managing drowsiness and low energy. Instead of continuing to blow money on dark chocolate bars, next month I intend to start making a cheap replacement. It finally occurred to me that the bars work so well because they contain protein, which regulates the rate of digestion. When I have dark chocolate without protein, the caffeine hits me all at once and doesn't last, and I feel jumpy and jittery. That's probably the case with coffee too, actually. No maybe not...when I have protein bars that are caffeinated with coffee, they work on me the same way coffee and protein-free dark chocolate does: too much too fast. So I'm planning to melt some dark chocolate and mix it into protein powder from the discount grocery store (if they still have any for sale). That should be cheaper than buying individual bars all month, and the protein powder is filling enough to form the base of a full meal, so I won't need to buy as much regular food. The caffeine from the chocolate will regulate my appetite so that I won't need to add much to those two ingredients to form a full meal; I'll probably just some fruit.

I'm not sure whether I have problems with wheat or problems with gluten. I bought some rye crispbread yesterday because I've been craving something bread-like...for years actually. Since giving up wheat, the lack of bread has been a continual unpleasantness in my life. Gluten-free bread costs a fortune, often it isn't vegan, and yesterday I found out that the one I had been buying contains oil (which disrupts my digestion of carbs and leads to low blood sugar and hunger shortly after eating). So I won't be buying that product anymore; indeed, I noticed that I was still hungry shortly after eating some of it. Rye contains gluten but is not wheat, so I don't know whether it'll give me problems with menstrual cramps or not, but I guess my craving overrode my fear of menstrual pain.

Yesterday, I started a new sci-fi novel. It's called Starfish. There's a good chance I won't get far with it. I see too much dialogue as I flip through it. Too much dialogue annoys me and is difficult to follow. I got tired of the previous novel, Rendezvous with Rama, because, at roughly the halfway mark, nothing much was happening, plus the irritation and disappointment I felt about the misogynistic remark I posted about before wore on me until it wore a hole through my motivation to finish. This is all rather fortunate, because I will have more time to focus on the Spanish novel I'm reading, which has turned out to be more interesting that I feared it would be. It seems to be a mystery, about a guy with amnesia who finds himself in a mental institution of a foreign country.

My new melatonin is a fast-acting pill, a pill that I chew, so I'll have to figure out when is the best time to take it. Two hours before bedtime is when I take capsules that are for sleep, at bedtime is for the quick-release melatonin; the new melatonin must be somewhere in-between those two. The bottle says to take it at bedtime, but everything I take seems to digest more slowly than it's supposed to, so I need to take it earlier.

I ate my usual dark chocolate bars early this morning, but I've still been drowsy and fatigued so far today. They've never worked so poorly. If they stop working, I'm in trouble because my sleep hasn't improved and I can barely get anything done without that caffeine. I don't expect the progesterone to do anything for me.

The squalene seems to be be breaking out my forehead. Maybe it'll be ok if I use it less often. Probably not. Goddamned everything clogs my pores or gives me pimples. However, my face did something it's scarcely done since I was in Sacramento: it peeled after a skin peel. That tells me that I'm doing something right. I should try the squalene made of sugarcane rather than this olive-based one, but I couldn't find it on iherb.

I made the mistake of clicking on one of the interests in my Dreamwidth profile and looking at a few of the journals that were in the results. I don't know why I bother with this because I'm never much interested in reading anyone else's journal, and I get annoyed and weirded out that every other journal is some kind of fanfic. Actually, the first one was surprisingly well-written and easy to understand. Most of the journals I see on here are an incoherent mess of too little punctuation, inconsistent capitalization, incomplete sentences, and no clear subject. I've seen a couple of them who are considerate enough to put right in the journal title what readers need to know about their writing style: that it's "rambling."

After that, a bunch of people with a paragraph in their profile about who they don't want to read/follow their journal, which groups of people can "fuck off," etc. These people trying to control who reads their journal with words. Why. They have access lists, they can make the journal private. Perhaps it has never occurred to them that people they disagree with might change their (own) minds or at least understand them better after reading their journals, but all these journal authors seem like SJWs, whose non-arguments couldn't sway a tree branch in a hurricane, and whose emotions (especially hostility) trump everything, so perhaps they know that they're unlikely to enlighten anyone.

I haven't thought about it much in the past few years, but I used to consider myself to be an anti-civ anarchist. It's not that I've changed my mind so much as it's that I see so much immaturity in fully grown adults that it seems pointless for me to even think about a lifestyle that's so heavily based on shouldering responsibility for oneself and one's community. Stupid shit like leaving guns lying around in a home with children, drinking bleach to prevent covid, and contact sports would leave more people dead or severely maimed for life if not for the medical systems that civilized societies have set up for us. Then again, guns, bleach, and sports leagues wouldn't exist without civilization either, so maybe those are bad examples. The point is that most of the irresponsible, self-destructive bullshit civilized people do now wouldn't fly without the state to rely on.

Once again I've run out of energy before I finish my post.

According to NBC News, Trump pardoned over fifteen hundred of the people convicted of crimes associated with the Capitol riots. Maybe kinda sorta he's taking responsibility for egging them on?

My medical phone appointment ended a while ago. I'm low in D3 (even though I supplement daily), omega 3, and, as I already knew, iron. She said I can take double my D3 dose every other day. More money I don't have. I have to try iron supplements until we find one that doesn't hurt my stomach; the one she's ordering first might be covered by insurance. The iron shots probably won't be covered by insurance because my levels aren't low enough. I can also add a bunch of stuff to my diet that I cannot afford: more greens, mushrooms, etc. More produce. I've been dying for chard, actually, but it's not in the budget (and the local stores have only rainbow chard, which gives my dishes a weird color).

The cheapest dietary change I can make will be increasing my tofu consumption, and I think I need more protein anyhow. I'm hoping tofu has omega 3. I was thinking of ditching the protein powder (fourteen bucks per month and the discount grocery store probably won't have any more of it anyhow), but I found that one serving contains 20% RDA of iron. I was surprised. But it's still better to use that money on greens or tofu, even though fifteen measly bucks won't buy me much produce.

The tofu comes out at about thirty cents less per serving with twenty fewer calories and twenty-five percent less iron, but just over half the protein. That should balance out enough so that I'm not eating many more calories. I haven't been as satisfied as I was with the protein powder, and I think the lack of fat during that meal may be the culprit. So I'm hoping that the fattier tofu will help me.

Also I have this Japanese seasoning that is insanely high in iron (because, I assume, it's largely made of kelp): 8% RDA for just one tablespoon. It's addictive and I had already been planning to buy more of it. I'll get three bottles next month.

I've been eating rice for two months now without gaining any weight, so I know for sure now that I can actually have it. That means that I can deploy a powerful poor person eating strategy: buying a ginormous bag of rice and thereby saving the bulk of my money for produce. I can get months worth of rice for like twenty bucks or less at the Asian market. There's just two problems: I'm worried about that rice being non-organic, and rice still isn't very filling. Not as filling as the more-expensive mung bean noodles, that is. (Bananas, rice, mung bean noodles, tofu, and potatoes, those are my staples.) So I could remain stuck where I am now, unable to lose any more weight. (I've got just five more pounds to go.) And hauling a twenty-five pound bag of rice home on public transportation would be a pain in the ass. So I need to work out a compromise between the amount of rice and the amount of mung bean noodles I purchase.

I slept for only maybe an hour or two this morning and I feel weird, numb, like I'm on a very mild, subtle downer, like everything is slightly muted. My stomach hurts, yet I'm cut off from the pain somehow. It's somewhat peaceful yet vaguely disturbing, like a big field that's empty and quiet because it was bombed recently.

My facial peels, mild as they are, have improved the area around my mouth but seem to have worsened the sides of my face. So I guess I've no choice but to give up on peels until summer or spring, when the air is more humid. My face will be half healed on its own by then. Simply leaving it alone works, although it takes forever. So I'll look like this or slightly better for months and just remain stuck. I get more time to figure out where and how to find a boyfriend.

I'm taking my profile pictures down. There are no eligible guys on those sites anyhow, plus I don't want any more people looking at my pics. There's just no point in compromising my privacy right now. I took most of those pics when my skin looked better, so they don't accurately represent me anyhow.

It's late afternoon now and coverage of my iron supplement was rejected. The pharmacist checked the price and even added a discount. It came to five dollars. I have negative forty-six dollars in my bank account and two dollars worth of quarters for laundry. So back to the clinic the prescription must go. Sad. I don't know how long this will take or whether we'll ultimately get anything covered.

I have an iron supplement I bought a long time ago and I'm considering taking it just before bed so that whatever cramping I have will take place while I'm asleep. But what if I have more nights without sleep? Lying in my bedroom, cold, awake, tired, and frustrated is bad enough. Adding crampy to the mix would be awful. But I'm desperate to not be freezing all the time. I just looked up some tips and I'll try starting with a lower dose and having fruit juice to aid digestion of the iron. Maybe I can get something covered by the VA. My civilian health insurance is crap.

My new suppositories don't work very well but at least the cramping is mild.

One thing I dislike about this country that's not as serious as the crime and social dysfunction are the giants everywhere. I'm not talking about obesity this time (although that contributes to the overall effect of monstrousness), I'm talking about how tall people are here. I bet it's because of the excessive amounts of animal protein in our diet. I should look it up someday but I'm not sure what to look up because tallness is considered normal in this society, as well as desirable, so people are less likely to investigate it and write about it. Once I watched an interview in which a six-foot tall guy, in this country, was rejected by a modeling agency for not being tall enough.

One of the reasons I never really felt attracted to men is how huge they (the ones I've been exposed to the most) tend to grow. There's an unnaturalness about it. They look like ogres to me, with their towering statures, their huge hands and feet, their hairy faces and bodies. I dislike craning my head up to look towards their faces. People weren't this big throughout history, and it wasn't just because they were malnourished or part of a pygmy tribe.

From time to time I find myself in the men's shoe department, marveling at a shoe size 10+. It seems like human beings aren't even in our developmental period long enough to grow such a large foot. Tall womyn strike me as odd as well, but womyn are never as ugly and unhuman as men are.

On occasion, I would come across a guy who wasn't tall, who was less than 5'7 or so, usually Latin American, possibly an immigrant. I was always struck by how pleasing to the eye, how neat and tidy, how normal they looked. They're human-sized. I can take them all in without craning my neck. They look like normal human beings to me even though I grew up in this society of giants. And one day it occurred to me that I could be around people like this all the time. And on another day, it occurred to me, to my delight, that I could date one of them.

I would prefer to live some place where people are human-sized. I dislike being seen as or called "short" by these overgrown brutes. I would prefer to live some place where tallness is not considered superior or more manly. I dislike people ragging on men who aren't tall. I don't know how big people are in Taiwan, but I hope to find out. It seems to be a rule that people in developed countries start over-consuming animal products once their region grows richer (I guess the exception would be in the Artic, where people have had no choice, throughout history, but to rely heavily on animal products). I was reading something about South Korean men being the tallest in Asia (not sure whether that's true), and it reminded me of something else I'd read about South Korea's economy expanding rapidly after the Korean War. There's not enough time to look up all the things that pique my curiosity.

With the recent temperature drop, keeping the bedroom window closed at all times isn't enough for me to stay warm throughout the night. Last night was the last straw: I woke up at midnight, so cold that I lay for hours in a stupor, unable to even think well enough to figure out what to do for myself. I finally thought to turn on the heater, but it was almost time to get up for the morning by then. I was swaddled in a flannel sheet inside my heavy cotton blanket that I've sewn up into a sleeping bag liner, inside a hemp sleeping bag, under a throw, a blanket, and a quilt, while wearing a hat. Still couldn't stay warm. It isn't even winter yet.

So I thought it time to buy yet more bedclothes. I figured I needed something thick and heavy, such as a quilt. The problem is that all my bedclothes have to be made of natural fibers, and most bedclothes are made of polyester. Quilts, comforters, etc. are expensive enough as it is, but 100% cotton versions are astronomical in cost.

Even with more bedclothes, I still need some type of heating at bed time to doze off, so I figured I'd try to kill two pedestrians with one SUV by purchasing an electric bedspread of some kind. I've been using an iron to heat up the foot of my sleeping bag liner, and I've now burned myself with the iron several times, so I want to stop using it. This is the same thing that happened when I was heating my bedclothes with rocks from my toaster oven. Sleepiness, desperate chilliness, and uncovered heating sources don't mix.

A 100% cotton electric bedspread is a unicorn; electric bedclothes are even more likely to be made of polyester than non-electric ones. Plus most heated bedclothes are blankets, and I figured I'd need something heavier than that. I did find one such blanket online, but it was being sold in Europe and likely wouldn't have fit my electrical outlet.

So I took the bus to the mall and went through five department stores searching. Very few 100% cotton or linen (I thought linen was made of cotton but I guess not) bedclothes, none of them heated. The only affordable cotton bedclothes I could find were throws (which are too small), sheets (probably too thin?), and the same blanket I already have. Manufacturers really have some nerve selling giant puffs of polyester for over a hundred dollars. Quality materials are sadly lacking from a lot of the garbage sold in this country. We really are a plastic culture.

I spent three hours shopping and going from store to store, then I was so weak from lack of food that my movements slowed down and I could barely think straight. I finally decided that I'd wait for my blood test results and maybe I could take a vitamin that would warm me up so that I wouldn't have to spend money I don't have. Not paying my energy bill again might be an option, but it's already fifty bucks past due so I'd rather not go that route. I also decided that I'd try wrapping myself in my blanket inside the sleeping bag instead of laying the blanket over my body outside the sleeping bag. Despite being a child's size, the sleeping bag has some space in it, space that I cannot heat up with my non-existant body heat, space that gets filled with cold air maybe. The blanket will, I hope, take up more space and trap more heat close to my body.

Being thinner, it is also easier than the sleeping bag liner to heat up: I can turn on the living room heater, set the blanket on top of it, and let it heat up while I carry out the rest of my bedtime routine. I gave up heating the sleeping bag liner on the heater for using the iron; now, I'll go back to the safer heating routine.

This is all so absurdly complicated. I really cannot take another night of three or less hours of sleep because eating hurts my stomach now (and will worsen) unless I eat processed food, of which I don't have much. I lucked out and found two bags of pita left in the laundry room of my apartment complex, and, for a few days, that helped fill the gap in my caloric intake. I can have only a couple of bites of most of my fruit before the pain starts.

I cannot find any affordable compression gloves. I gave up on looking for compression socks. My local pharmacy has a compression thigie for the hand and wrist; it costs seventeen bucks per hand. I decided to try a poor person's compression: rubber bands. Then as I was putting them on this morning, I thought about rubber bands cutting off circulation, which would worsen my problem with cold extremities. But I tried them anyways. I took the rubber bands off my wrists (which, I assume, would isolate blood from my hands even more) and crossed two across my palms. I put a band around one of my feet instead of around my ankle. It was an experiment. The rubber bands didn't seem to do much except cut down somewhat on the pain by numbing my hand and foot.

I went to the bathroom in the third deparment store and had a good look in a well-lighted mirror. My skin is worse than it even looks here at home. I felt down but also kind of numb, maybe because I'm kind of used to this. I've had problems with skin discoloration all my life; it started when I was an adolescent but the trash who raised me never took me to a dermatologist or anything. But that's not the only thing I'm used to; I'm used to things going wrong and being too poor to fix them, at least not in a timely fashion. I always have to spread my expenses out over months even though I never buy anything terribly expensive.

So I bought my last facial peel a couple of days ago. I've gone through pretty much all the peels that can give me any good results here, in this climate. It's glycolic acid, one I'm familiar with, and it's supposed to work relatively quickly. I think most of the discoloration I have now is only rather shallow in terms of skin depth. I've also had noticeable results by using just one layer of lactic acid. So I'm hopeful that things will improve soon. But how soon, that's always the question. And how much improvement will there be.

Thinking about my issues with the cold this morning, I was reminded of the novel Cold People that I read earlier this year. I mused that if I, like the characters, were faced with the prospect of spending the rest of my life in Antarctica, I'd likely stay put and take my chances with the aliens (who coerced humankind south with a display of technological superiority). My quality of life on that continent would be ABYSMAL. I wouldn't be able to even venture outdoors, no matter how much and what kind of clothing or equipment I had. With my hands getting cold enough to ache underneath two pairs of gloves in the California autumn, I'd be helpless against the Antarctic climate.

Plus my chronic vitamin D3 deficiency would likely kill me in the dark winters. But before all that happened, my fellow (male) humans would kill me first. I'd rather be on Jupiter than packed onto any Earthbound continent with the mass of surviving mankind.

I ask a straight-forward question. Someone assumes something I neither said nor implied and responds with a long tangent about shit I never asked about. The bonus is when I point out the assumption or ask for a straight-forward answer and they get confused or defensive about their own assumption.

Over and over again this happens. It's become pointless to talk to anyone. It's as if we're not even talking to one another. I'm talking to them but they are just talking about whatever pops into their minds regardless of what I'm saying. I say "go," it reminds them of pogo sticks, and they're off talking about pogo sticks. Absolute morons. How does anyone communicate with anyone else ever? Maybe they don't. I've sometimes observed people just making talking noises at one another instead of really engaging in what their conversation partners are actually saying. Maybe this makes up a significant portion of their "communication."

Men have thick skin. Literally. Or that's what they look like, at least. I wonder what anything even feels like to them with skin so thick. There is probably some research about differences in tactile sensitivity between the sexes.

It's weird, ugly, and repulsive. Sometimes I see one with notably thick skin in a video online and think, "oh I can't do this." How could I let one of these creatures touch me? I just need to find one that doesn't look like a lizard I guess.

I feel like neither sex is all that great and I'd be happiest with an intersexed partner. Especially one of the ones with an enlarged clit. Once I was listening to some sort of radio program that had an intersexed woman on it. She said she had a two-inch long clit that she'd used for intercourse. It sounded like a dream come true: flesh-on-flesh intercourse with zero risk of pregnancy. She had given birth so she definitely did not have a functioning male reproductive system.

I wonder how much of womyn's behavior is socialization vs. individual nature (not that they are entirely separate). Recently it occurred to me that I have hardly ever had the opportunity to discuss anything STEM-related in womyn's spaces or with individual womyn (partially my fault I guess for never broaching the subject but the time was never right) and that I felt slightly deprived on that score. I go to the separate Linux or math/science forums that are full of guys.

Recently it also occurred to me that if I date men I significantly increase my chances of dating someone who is really interested in STEM. Strangely exciting, the thought of possibly dating an engineer. Not because of the prestige or the income, but because of the access to the kind of mind that is seriously interested in engineering. Someone who might actually spontaneously bring up calculus or something. Now that sounds like a dream come true.

Sort of off-topic: The first womon I dated brought up calculus. She knew that I was a Physics major and she asked me how to solve a certain kind of problem she was having. But she was taking calculus for like life sciences or something (life sciences suck because living things are messy and die too easily), the dumbed-down, more practical version of calculus. (I guess you could say the physics and engineering majors were taking a dumbed-down, more practical version of the math majors' proof—based calculus.) Neither I nor her engineering major roommate could help her, apparently, because we had learned to solve that sort of problem by a method that she apparently wasn't being taught. But it was such a fundamental method that I cannot even imagine what she was expected to do.

Actually, I'm not even into engineering much myself. I find the theoretical sciences much more compelling. I've always wanted to know why or how much more than I cared to put the knowledge to practical use. Practical stuff gets on my nerves sometimes because I feel like there's always some situation in which one has to do something without knowing why or use a tool without knowing how it works, which opens up the possibility of mis-using it.

I guess I'm done rambling.

Today was the first application of my new, milder facial peel. It didn't even burn until the third layer. My face was surprising soft during. The burning or lack thereoff can be deceiving; the glycolic acid I ended up peeling slices of my cheeks off with also didn't burn much.

The only other times this has happened, I was homeless and therefore unable to find places where I could actually sleep. Bad memories.

I don't know why I'm so bad off today. I slept the night before last. Usually it takes days of nearly no sleep for my symptoms to get bad. It's usually the IBS symptoms and fatigue that are bad, but my IBS isn't acting up.

I finally found a good resource for learning Zhuyin Fao, which will enable me to type Chinese characters. Speaking and listening skills developing way ahead of reading and writing/typing is one of the wild things about learning Mandarin. Last week I read an online article about a guy who'd been studying the language for three years and could still barely read a newspaper. That won't be me. I have a good source for learning to read. I don't think I'll ever bother with writing, though. It's all rote memorization, and for so little gain. Most of my "writing," if any, will be done on a computer, so typing is the priority.

During my morning walk, I had to return home prematurely three times. Ten or fifteen minutes into the walk, my head started hurting because I was dehydrated, so I came back for water. This was after I'd had maybe three fourths of a can of tea with breakfast (the cans that food comes in, because I have no glasses or cups right now). I'm not sure what dehydrated me. Usually it's some sort of electric heater in contact with my body, but nothing like that had transpired beforehand. Then, an hour later, I had to return home for an urgent bathroom break. I've never had liquid go through me so quickly. The same thing happened again, an hour later (I usually do 2.5 to 3 hours of walking in the morning). It was annoying.

I'm eagerly awaiting another check from DOR. It's for three months of Internet, for which I've already paid, so the money will go towards more skincare. I'm going to get some much milder products for fading hyperpigmentation. No more TCA! Not unless I find myself in a humid environment again. I've begun to worry about how the dry air here will affect my physical appearance long-term. I hate waiting for checks over the weekend. When they don't arrive, I have to wait until Monday. And I'm always in dire need of the money. Ok, somewhat dire, not starving dire.

I missed the weekly food bank giveaway day before yesterday, so I'll be running out of food soon. I can buy some with money instead of food stamps, but I always have so little money that I try hard to make do with food stamps only.

While I was out shopping for a quilt, I bought an extractor to clear my clogged pores. It doesn't work on some of the pores; nothing comes out despite there being a visible little whitehead.

My hair is starting to look a mess while I wait to find a barber. I found a list of sensory-friendly barbers and have emailed two of them. I just don't have it in me to talk on the phone. So I'm waiting for an email reply.

I don't think I'll go out for a walk this evening; I feel exhausted and I walked into town earlier this afternoon (twice because I forgot my debit card the first time). Normally, I'm very strict about not missing walks but I don't usually feel this depleted. I think the stress of undereating is finally starting to catch up with me, both mentally and physically. I can take a few days or even a week off from the diet if I really need to. But maybe sleep will fix me up.

I tried watching a video about this (French?) woman dating a Chinese guy, but she started the video off with flirty bullshit womyn do plus there was music playing in the background (which makes speech more difficult for me to understand), so I had to turn it off. I just don't bother with womyn's videos anymore when they start with the effeminate bullshit like heavily modulating their tone of voice or jiggling around, fiddling with hair or whatever: I can't stand it anymore. It's weird and distracting. Just sit there and talk like a normal person.

Ok, I went out anyways and I'm glad I did. I was craving chocolate so I went for a protein bar. Walking always puts me in such a good mood nowadays, even though I'm walking to the point of hurting my feet daily and undereating. It was pleasant when I was doing just two hours a day, but it didn't feel as good as it does now. I need to know how much I'll need to walk to maintain once I reach my goal body composition. Given that I maintained my weight in the mid 120s on two hours per day, I'm guessing three hours a day to stay in the teens.

I'll have to figure out my caloric intake as well. I'm shifting my diet back to a higher fruit content + protein powder (along with my staple, tofu). Being on a processed food long-term is not ideal, but I have a medical condition that causes me to struggle to maintain my weight, and I'm not going to put up with that struggle. Plus the protein powder goes well with fruit and is easy to prepare. Hopefully any negative effects will be outweighed by the massive amount of minerals and antioxidants I'll be consuming. Also I always buy the cleaner protein powders.

As of this morning, I've quit Pimsleur Korean. It's inefficient and exasperating, and I just can't take it anymore. The speakers speak so quickly that I cannot even mimic them sometimes (and this is the core of the method). I hear words over and over again and cannot remember them because I'm not an auditory learner, and the lack of grammatical explanation makes it difficult to know what's one word or two (or more).

I'm relieved to be doing just one Pimsleur course (Mandarin) now. Mandarin works much better as a Pimsleur course because the grammar is simple and the difficulty in speaking the language lies in its sounds (the tonal system, specifically). As good as the Mandarin course is, it's still as fatiguing and a bit dull as all the other Pimsleur courses; that's why I'm glad to be doing only one. I started with Cantonese but I just couldn't take another Pimsleur course.

I've been struggling to find good learning resources for Korean. Surprisingly, Duolingo seems to be the best so far.

I guess I should be done with facial peels now. I may have done more damage than what I've fixed. But it's superficial and will be gone in a few months.

Diet is going so well: I'm never really very hungry (in fact, at least once per day I'm bemoaning the need to eat yet another meal) and that thigh gap is coming in. I'd rather have men's thighs, to be honest. Not only are typical female thighs prone to fat storage, they have a weird shape.

I need to find a job so I can afford some furniture. I need a bed and a table at least. I don't want used furniture because it's all varnished and I don't want the varnish off-gassing in my living space as it ages. Also, I want one of those Japanese tables, a chobodai I think it's called, so I can use it while sitting on the floor. I don't have nor want any chairs (except the wicker chair in my bedroom). Sitting on the floor helps me maintain my mobility, which is super important to me.

I'll do ok with clothing once I can fit into the few other pairs of pants that I have, but my wardrobe is very limited.

I also need a job so that I can afford a professional haircut! That would improve my appearance so much. Just a couple of hundred dollars more would make a big difference in my life.

Maybe I will go back to Pimsleur Korean or Cantonese after I learn the basics somewhere else. I did Pimsleur French after I'd spent years studying French and it was very effective and not as unpleasant as doing Pimsleur as a novice of the language.

I didn't get the remote job I was onboarding for. I wasted my time reading dozens of pages of their privacy policy and other documents I had to agree to. As soon as I finished clicking "Agree" and submitted my digital onboarding stuff, I was rejected. The rejection was automated, and I wasn't given a reason, only informed that I wasn't a fit for the current project.

I think the reason was either my having used a (free) mobile number based in Russia or my having indicated that I don't use mainstream anti-virus software. I read in some of the documents that the company expects workers to have top-of-the line anti-virus software to maintain the integrity of the documents the company sends.

I got a bit further depressed than I was in my last post; now, I'm so dejected that I'm kind of numb. I read somewhere that Jesser skin peels have a lower likelihood of causing pih, so I tried it. I've given myself even more pih. I have a dark ring around my mouth. The problem is that my source has two kinds of Jessner peels; the traditional one and one that contains what I'm now forced to recognize as my nemesis: TCA. Perhaps foolishly, I bought the TCA one.

Maybe this happen because of the TCA exactly, but because I was too aggressive in my peel application technique. I gave myself two peels in quick succesion, without waiting for my skin to heal much from the first. Plus I did a lot of layers.

If I weren't so numb, I'd feel like a fool for doing this to myself again. At least it isn't as bad as it was last time. I've learned my lesson: just don't bother with TCA. I can fade my pih with salicylic acid peels, glycogen peels, and hydroquinone. The question is: how long will that take, especially given that I don't have the money to buy these things. My energy bill is gonna be two months behind by the time I get around to paying any of it. I simply cannot get ahead of the poverty.

So my dating plan has been pushed back even further. Having time to think about how I'll go about it has been good, but I just have too much time.

I seem to have gained back a couple of the pounds I lost. Also depressing. I spent around fifty dollars on date rolls because they are relatively high-calorie and I was undereating too much last month. Now, I'm fairly sure, it's the date rolls that are causing me to gain weight. So I need to stop eating them, which leaves something of a hole in my diet because I'd intended for them to be a major source of my calories this month. With what shall I fill that hole?

I'm sleeping a bit more, but still not enough for my bowel function to return to normal. An uncomfortably full colon that I cannot empty still wakes me up in the wee hours of the morning sometimes. I still get stomach cramps that last for hours.

I also still wake up cold early in the morning. I'm going to have to buy more bedclothes. Another health-related item I cannot afford. I've bought a throw and a blanket and that still isn't enough, because, I suppose, of the autumn cool that's recently returned.

Needless to say, I'm quite frustrated. The only good thing that's happened to me this month is that I've stopped over-dosing on melatonin and thus have much more energy/much les fatigue and grogginess. Also I feel that I'm making some good progress with Korean, albeit somewhat haphazardly.

I just bit the bullet and opened my latest energy bill. I added only about thirty dollars to my bill this past month, so my total bill isn't as much as I feared it would be. Plus my account isn't seriously delinquent yet. I'll be able to get away with paying just a portion of it, so I'll have money enough left over to buy some more skin peels and/or hydroquinone, along with the supplements I need (and haven't been able to get my health insurance to cover. perhaps I'll post about that struggle another day).

I find the contrast between the hype surrounding pop music and the shallowness of pop music to be depressing. I need to stop wasting my time with kpop because it is the cause of this depression. But I've found a handful of really good songs and feel driven to search for more.

I need to find something to sustain myself while I'm waiting for my face to heal. This sort of applies to my derailed weightloss as well, but that will quickly get back on track as soon as I get next month's groceries. It's fading pih that I need to play the long game for. I've been able to distract myself from my fatigue and insomnia, but this desire for physical intimacy is so distracting that I struggle to focus on my typical distractions, and my depressed mood saps me of the desire to do much besides vegetate in front of a youtube video, plus I'm still low on energy because I don't sleep.