citrakayah: (cutthecrap)
I continue to fail at finding work! I've had interviews over the past month, yes. But it's been weeks and nothing's come of them. There's another one this week for a technician position (not going to go into the details on a public post), yet I've basically given up hope at this point. The final straw was a manual labor position saying they wanted to interview me, not sending me the Zoom link, rescheduling, not sending me the Zoom link again, and then after I tracked down their number and called them, promising me an interview and then not sending me one. At that point they're either malicious or wildly incompetent, but I'm still taking it as an omen.

The job market is shit. It's going to continue to be shit. The fact that it's shit is, I suspect, partially deliberate; HR departments are putting up fake jobs (those are estimated to be 30% of job postings, by the way) in part to intimidate employees and I'm sure some of them are thinking, "If we make getting a job as torturous as possible, our employees will never quit and any new hire will be pathetically grateful for scraps." There is a real possibility that by this time next year I still don't have a job.

And I've been applying for gas station attendant positions!

I don't want to hear optimism at this point. Pessimism feels better.

Winter holidays were at least pleasant. My brother was over for Hanukkah, along with his girlfriend (who I'd met before and whom I like). We did not have much in the way of latkes but did make some sweet potato ones. And we got to go hiking. There were ducks.

I wasn't able to give much in the way of gifts. I'm working on art projects that I'm going to give instead, and some of the gifts I got from other people will help me do that. I've started working with watercolors and will be working with glass again soon. And I was already creating kumihimos--no, not kumihos, I like my liver too much for that. I'm by no means that good at art, but I'm not terrible for a total novice. It'll at least be welcome on the wall for reasons other than them being family.

With the weather I'm not spending as much time outdoors as I normally do. The weather is frigid but it's not snowing, which is always the worst combination. I don't like snow or ice, but if it's frigid the world should look nice rather than just looking dead. And on that note I really do need to go through the camera trap at some point and see what wildlife we have in the woods pathetic strip of trees behind the house.

I've at least been able to spend more time with local groups. There's a local crafts group I'm going to join and the local game shop hosts some events. At this point I've long since stopped having anything to do with the local synagogue. I tried, but I can't go from reading about Israeli war crimes to hanging out in a building dripping with Israeli nationalist symbology* just because I share a religion with those people.

* This is not unusual for a synagogue. Yes I know that sounds stupid. It's still true. There's Israeli flags in the classrooms.

Vent

Feb. 20th, 2024 10:29 am
citrakayah: (friends)
The existence of social media that allows you to reblog things has been a plague upon the Internet.

Back before those sites gained traction, if someone had a blog, you'd be reading their thoughts. Maybe their thoughts were personal, maybe they gave away very little about the person's life but were about some scientific topic. Maybe their thoughts were not well put together or maybe they were really good. But you were reading their thoughts. You could actually form some sort of connection with people. It might not be super deep, but it could be. I met people who I got to know well through Dreamwidth, and I know people have formed even deeper connections.

That's not totally disappeared, but now when I look through Tumblr and Twitter blogs it's mostly reblogs or likes. I'm not actually getting to know the person, I'm getting to know what they like. If I want to find an original thought by this person, I have to trawl through a bunch of reblogs and likes to find it. There's exceptions but that's the rule. And it's not that these people don't have original thoughts (I know that isn't true; I know and respect many of them). It's just that I'm not seeing them.

But it still makes me feel like I can't actually get to know them, which is unfortunate both because there's people who seem cool that I don't know and people I do know that I only really see on Tumblr and Twitter now. Other people somehow manage to form deep connections through Tumblr and Twitter, but I'm genuinely not sure how they do it--whenever I look at the average person's blog, it just seems like a jumble of assorted stuff.
citrakayah: (on the defense)
You've been told never to get COVID. You've been told never to get the flu. Let me tell you that they go even worse together. I somehow managed to get both at once when visiting family for Thanksgiving. I'm not sure whom I got it from--probably not my parents, since they came down after I did, and it couldn't have been from a third party because I only went outside in isolated public parks. One of my other relatives seems the most likely possibility.

It was nasty. I've never had body aches from being sicky before. Injuries, yes; I've fallen down my share of slopes (and off a cliff, once); that hurt. But for two days I had trouble moving because I was aching, and at night even with four blankets I had chills. Then I had nausea, and the second worst case of congestion I've ever had. The symptoms lasted a week, though there was a gap of two days when I seemed to be fine.

Luckily, things have cleared up now.

As far as classes, I'm in the tail end of things. Finals have been going well--aside from my group presentations. Which, given that they're what I'm doing for two thirds of my classes, is a rather large wrinkle in things. It's not affecting my grades, but it's still been frustrating. For one class, my group-mate got injured and so I'm having to work by myself. Not their fault, but unfortunate for us both.

For the other? I put in a ton of effort, read like fifteen papers, but they ended up not using much of the research I put in to try and help them and their own work was, in my opinion, kind of sloppy. There were a lot of misspellings and grammatical errors. They didn't give really in-depth explanations of what they were talking about but gave superficial surface-level stuff you'd teach to a middle-schooler.

Given that we're graduate students, that's pretty frustrating.

Family is doing well. Unfortunately, I won't be with them for Hanukkah, because of finals. This is actually the first year in a while I haven't been able to visit them for it. Still, they visited today and I got to enjoy their company.

Ugh.

Sep. 9th, 2023 10:44 pm
citrakayah: (Default)
Eye Health )

I'd like to see an eye doctor, but New Hampshire is a health care desert if you're on Medicaid. Some places have waiting lists stretching until January. It's the same situation as it was for dental work. Now, I was able to get my teeth cleaned (thank fuck) and I've got a lead on a place that can check my eyes, but like the dental place it's going to be a long car drive away.

This would be so, so much easier if healthcare providers could not decline Medicaid. Or if we had single payer. I'm pretty sure that would solve this. They can't discriminate according to health insurance company if there's only one health insurance, and it's through the government. If we're going to have the state anyway, it might as well do something useful....

I've had a lot of health problems lately; it's a fucking pain. They're not emblematic of any larger problems--it's an eye infection, insufficient tooth care, and acid reflux--and they're not causing permanent damage, but I still hate it.

University has also kicked up again. I'll post something on that, and some of the local nature walks I've done lately, later. This is mostly a whine. No cheese included.
citrakayah: (Default)
The job I've got pays well. It's pretty decent all things considered. But.

It's all inside; where I work there are almost no windows and it's under fluorescent lightning. I'm isolated from the weather; even in thunderstorms I'm lucky to hear them over the chirping and banging of the HVAC system--which booms many times a week, startling me out of my skin. I'm disconnected from the plant and animal life. There are many potted plants in the hallways, but it's simply not the same. And, well, it's kind of shitty as far as exercise goes.

And I liked working outside. When I was in the Northeast, I got caught in thunderstorms--but that gave me a thrill. Sure, it was occasionally annoying, but only mildly. It wasn't as if I was in real danger from getting soaked; the only time I minded was when there was a major squall and it was really cold so I was sprayed with cold seawater for the entire time.

Even if it hadn't given me a thrill, seeing the horseshoe crabs, and the hermit crabs, and the birds, and the sunsets over the bay, would have made it more than worth it. But there's not so much nature around here. Oh, there's some--monarch butterfly caterpillars, woodpeckers, the neighborhood owl, robins and rabbits and squirrels and blue jays. Flies and beetles and wasps swarming the boneset. But there's less of it, and I spend most of the day isolated from it. It doesn't ground me like it did when working in the field.

The notion that you can feel more like yourself is, I suppose, by nature a false one. However you feel, that is what you are. If you feel like an emotionally numb worker staring at your email inbox, that is what you are. But the parts of me that I like the most and made me feel like the self I identify as were most present when working in the field.

Makes sense, I suppose. My view of myself is wrapped up in wilderness and wildness; working inside for long periods was never going to be too good for me.

Oh Fuck

Sep. 11th, 2013 09:21 pm
citrakayah: (on the defense)
So.

Today I was in Physics 203A. Physics 203A is, I might add, very boring. The instructor does a decent impression of a monotone and is generally the type of person who, while perfectly nice and decent, is also not the type of person you would want to teach a class.

I'm struggling to remain focus. I'm fairly sure I'm succeeding.

Then I suddenly discover that everything has changed and twenty minutes of passed.

I don't know what happened. That scares me, because I. Don't. Understand. Did I fall asleep? It didn't feel like falling asleep; while falling asleep I have perception of time passing. The case manager working with me things it could have been a seizure, but surely something like that... I don't know, it seems unlikely. And afterwards, I felt ill. Standing up was a fight, and my stomach was in rebellion.

Oh, and the same day I lost my wallet for a while and ran headfirst into a glass wall.

Profile

citrakayah: (Default)
Citrakāyaḥ

June 2025

S M T W T F S
1234567
89 1011121314
15161718192021
22232425262728
2930     

Syndicate

RSS Atom

Most Popular Tags

Style Credit

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags
Page generated Jul. 7th, 2025 12:40 am
Powered by Dreamwidth Studios