dreamin.pink blog

my steno progress is going pretty well. went from like 4wpm to 15wpm within a few days, so i am making decent progress. i'm sure that i'll hit a plateau pretty quickly but for now it's going ok. still trying to find a way to get it ergonomic enough for me though.

i'm pretty excited bout the new job. it pays a little bit less than my old job but i think it's going to go well for me. just being able to help people all day, especially people who are having a hard time (people on food stamps, etc) is going to be more fulfilling to me than sitting in the "line drawing dungeon" all day and not having talked to anyone in two months. plus they're being flexible about e's appointments so that's good. big green flags everywhere.

i am kind of nervous bout the new job though, not gonna lie. what if i don't like it? what if they don't like me? so much anxiety. i want to try and stay here as long as i can, until i get certified for court reporting, that's my main priority.

i did get rejected from the dental position, thank god. it was going to be awkward if i had to turn it down. now it's just awkward on their end, not on my end! haha. i'm really glad i got an online position and not an in person position anyway, because we were planning on moving in a few years. it would have been stressful to know i'd have to find another job on top of a huge move like that.

ava is feeling better thankfully. we've just had her crated so she doesn't injure herself. i bought an expensive ass ramp for them to get up and down the couch, unfortunately it's just kinda required at this point because they're both getting so old and ava is a chiweenie so she's already awkwardly shaped.

so now i have all of next week to just be lazy guilt free. thing is, i'm running out of stuff to do. i've been playing the shit out of hello kitty island adventure, but i've pretty much 100%ed it by now except for a few really hard things, so not sure where to go from here. i did make my yearly doctors appointment just to get that out of the way, but other than that, not really much going on. going to try and relax.

really need to get an appointment with the new psych. the old one is super uncommunicative, and i need a refill on my meds. damn it. probably a few other things to do too, but can't really think of them for now.

sorry i haven't been around much! i'm going to try to return the comments in my inbox tomorrow if i can. depression has been getting the best of me unfortunately.

we went to the end-of-semester dinner for asl 101. we both got certificates which is fun. it was just me, elias, and our other friend in the class that came from 101, the rest of the people were from the higher classes. i guess that makes sense to me, the people in 101 aren't necessarily that dedicated to the language. the people that take the higher classes probably have some level of bond and dedication to the language and their fellow classmates.

it was really fun! of course, it was ASL only. it was so nice to just have silence besides laughter here and there, and i could actually communicate with people. i'm so happy for that.

i'm trying to work on my splurging problem in therapy right now and address the root issues, but it's really hard. for now, i'm just trying to hold off on spending any money until i figure that out. really hard when i just got paid, but here we are.

i got a job interview! well, a half interview. i'm going to be talking with a recruiter today. i redid my resume yesterday and suddenly i've started getting hits, so i guess that it's been my shitty resume the whole time. i pretty much changed it from "marketing speak" to something that's actually intelligible quickly and also listed my full stack web dev credentials. hoping that this actually gets me somewhere. i'm mainly looking because they're opening up the position that would be perfect for me EXTERNALLY!!! at my current job. and i know there's a very good chance that if they hire externally, i'll quit on the spot. so better to be prepared... and it's a good ego booster to know that i could get a (half) interview that easily.

also we woke up this morning and our AC was frozen over, so we called an HVAC person. but there's been flooding around here, so they haven't been able to come. there were two (!) tornado warnings here over the weekend, so bad that we took all our pets and hid out in the bathroom waiting for it to pass. and then yesterday lightning struck closer to our house than i've ever seen. a HUGE boom and just a bit scary. the weather has been crazy lately.

uh anyway i think that's about it see ya

b4 i write anything i will just say i see i got some comments/DMs i gotta reply to, i'll try to get to that today or tomorrow

but for today just a lil venting... ughhhhhh

depression

has been HELLA bad this month which has also kinda affected everything. plus i ran out of adderall and i don't even have the energy to fight to get it refilled, which is making me even more sleepy bc adderall is one of the only things that keeps me motivated and awake, otherwise i sleep 20 hours a day like my pets. but like... idk. i haven't even felt like being awake or anything.

work

is still a nightmare. it's really depressing me even worse than usual lmao. my main alter anastasia just kinda had a meltdown and said "fuck all yall" and is gone for now so bye i guess lmao. can't really say i blame her, this job is soul sucking. fucking sucks. and it's unfortunately causing a lil rift in the relationship with E. like a micro rift, barely even there but still there, which SUPER sucks.

sleep

is basically just non-existent these days, and when i do get sleep, i have night terrors every night. sometimes i'm able to get to sleep if my dog Toni is sleeping next to me, but she's the only one that helps. i've tried my other pets, and it's just toni. and bless her, unfortunately she is in a donut right now (a very cute one might i add, actually decorated like a pink donut) because she won't stop licking her leg and giving herself a hot spot. so when i'm trying to sleep, she's like twice as big as she should be because of the donut... haha. it's the only thing that helps me tho. i also forgot my meds last night which makes my sleep even WORSE.

finances

good god don't even get me started on this lmao. i have been impulse spending like money is literally burning a hole in my pocket and then wondering why i am broke. but it's like the impulse spending is due to my depression and trying to get like at least 1 serotonin however i can, but then i have -100 serotonins at the end of the month bc i'm stressed out about finances. but in the moment i'm like "yolo" and end up spending way too much... i'm going to talk to the therapist about it today.

therapy

oh also speaking of which therapy sucks it's hard and exhausting and she's currently doing some EDMR adjacent stuff w me and it makes me even sleepier than usual. like every week i feel like skipping & the only reason i don't is bc it's literally cheaper to just go than it is to pay the last minute cancellation fee :X i'll figure it out...

good stuff

there's a lot of good stuff going on in my life too tho! like for one thankfully E is actually decent with finances so my questionable financial "decisions" aren't impacting our life that much. plus ASL 101 is almost over and there's a dinner next week for all the people who were in all the ASL classes! i'm pretty excited 😍 elias and i are a few of the only people that are moving on to 102 though, which isn't surprising to me. i think that most people would take 101 to see if they like it, and if it doesn't really jive with them, they just stop coming. i get it... haha

This weekend was pretty nice. My friend Kendrick came over to help us out with yard work. Of course, he tried to ask for way less money than he actually deserved, so we gave him more than that. I was out there hauling the wood with him and talking with him for several hours. I told him that we wanted to go fishing with him and his wife, and he told his wife, and they both got super excited. They were especially excited that I had never been fishing before.

I was going to go to Deaf Night Out, but after talking to Kendrick for four hours, my social battery was drained. He is a very nice person, but he is one of those people that just talks for four hours straight. I love hearing about his life, stories, etc, but I didn't have much energy to go drive 2 hours, meet new people, then drive 2 hours back. Especially since Deaf social events tend to be fairly lengthy.

Kendrick did put up a fence for us though, so we can finally just let the dogs out without needing to have them on leashes. It's been about eight months of us only leash walking them in the backyard, so it was super refreshing to be able to just let them run around-- for us AND the dogs. They didn't really like being confined to being chained to us, and they're allowed to roam around more when they're just out in the backyard. Elias and I pulled the outdoor chairs out of the closet and just sat outside for a while. It's actually a decent temperature right now, but since we live in Texas, it's a very short window of decent weather. I'm trying to be outside as much as possible because of that. Every time I let the dogs out, I pull the chair back outside and sit down and watch them.

Other than that, we didn't really do much this weekend. Elias has gotten very heavily addicted to Diablo IV, which is good, because I've been very heavily addicted to Balatro. So we end up just spending a lot of time playing video games while sitting next to each other. It's still a form of spending time together, even though some people might not think so, ahaha.

As for my personal hobbies, still just mostly doing the pirating thing. Can't focus at work, so I usually end up getting distracted with that. I also started using Habitica which is somewhat helping keep me on task but isn't really powerful enough to handle my full ADHD brain. We also installed Debian, which is making a lot of the things we do easier and quicker. Whoever said Linux was more complicated than Windows hasn't actually used Linux, because you can just install things instantly from the command line, and there is mountains of FOSS software on here.

I have therapy tomorrow. I do not want to go to therapy tomorrow. Thinking about it is giving me a headache. Ah, well.

ETA: I fixed up the host's website https://adoration.me because it is extremely sloppy and tends to make typos everywhere. The Spotify link is also now working.

so much has happened that it's probably just better to put them all in categorical order instead of timeline.

work

a bunch of fucking bullshit. basically was de facto demoted because i advocated for myself and others to have fair pay & reasonable expectations. i'm ok with it, but it's still annoying. i'll just try to look for a new job asap.

one of our alters (anastasia) who is actually the main alter, or at least the center of the system, has work as a huge aspect of her personality. yesterday she found out that they had been under-counting her metrics for months, and then today even more so because they're changing the way the metrics for training are counted so we were being SEVERELY under-counted. she went on a rampage yesterday (which is... really not like her, so i guess final straw situation) & pretty much threw out everything we own that we purchased for ourselves. a few things survived. we told elias about it & he went out and got it from the trash bin... he's a keeper T_T

mother

she stopped talking to me bc she's a narcissist and i wasn't giving her attention. problem solved? not really honestly, because i still feel weird about the whole thing so it's not really resolved for me. trying to decide on what i want to do though...

health

i'm Deaf, so i've been pretty much solely focusing on learning ASL lately. elias and i take a class up in dallas twice a week (a two hour drive there and a two hour drive back... RIP.) i'm very clearly the most knowledgeable in class and can speak with decent enough "beginner fluency" i guess, i can hold normal conversations with people. so people have been looking to me to help teach them... but i'm def not a teacher hahaha i'm willing to sit next to people who are struggling but i am DEF not a teacher. the only reason i'm so far ahead of everyone else is because i practice like CRAZY because i actually have the impetus to practice like crazy haha. elias is hard of hearing but everyone else in the class is hearing besides one dude named mark who is hard of hearing/deaf (cochlear implants) who i think dropped out (i hope not!) the teacher is profoundly deaf though.

i am not profoundly deaf (yet), i can hear with my hearing aids and anything being beamed directly into my ears (like headphones/music etc.) trying to get ahead of it because my hearing is going pretty quickly at this point. at some point in the past few months i went from little d deaf to big D Deaf because of my integration into the community, learning ASL, etc. plus just holding the same culture and values and everything anyway.

it's been wonderful... like, holy shit. going to class the first time was a trip. i could actually talk to people. i was super outgoing because i could actually communicate. that's also part of the reason i'm learning so fast... it's allowing me to be able to communicate! our first class was "my name is X. nice to meet you." we had to go around saying this to everyone, and mark and i had a very brief conversation where i said i am deaf but i was nervous because there was a lot of people, and he said that i didn't need to be. whenever he passed behind me, instead of saying "excuse me", he tapped me on the shoulder

i almost started crying right then and there. this awesome inclusive environment, where the guy actually tapped me on the shoulder to let me know he was going behind me instead of saying "excuse me" where i wouldn't actually hear. i just... yeah. it was so relieving and nice and i just felt welcome for like, the first time in my life

but!! with my hearing getting worse, embarrassing stuff keeps happening. i need to really remember to wear my hearing aids whenever we go out. we went to ASL class last wednesday, and i thought that i wouldn't need them because i thought we were just going to class (and we don't voice in class.) we went to starbucks beforehand and someone was trying to ask if we were in line. all i heard is "are you" and thought it was a worker (due to how quick she was walking) saying "how are you" and i said "good, you?" and she gave me the nastiest look and moved past us. elias was like "she was saying are you in line" and i was like ok well i couldn't hear that.

in class, there were two occasions when i was trying to hear someone say something (because they weren't getting it across in sign.) on the first, i thought she was asking for how to say "language" because whenever she was saying "how do i sign?" she kept saying "how do i sign language?" and she told me out loud what she meant underneath her breath but i couldn't hear her. second occasion, someone was trying to ask if the sign for sun and shower are the same, but the teacher (and me apparently) weren't understanding, i thought she was asking about "sauna." i fingerspelled "sauna" to the teacher, and the teacher was like "oh" and started to explain sauna, and everyone else was like NOOOO! SUN!

elias looked over to me and was like "you're deaf too!" and i was like oh yeah. and now every time i go out i have to say "huh?" and have people repeat themselves constantly, if i don't have my hearing aids on. so i need to make it a habit of just wearing my hearing aids everywhere but to be honest, once i'm fluent enough in ASL, i'm just. not going to use english anymore. it doesn't work for me! and i don't mind being deaf!!

(i really need to go back to the ENT soon, but i keep putting it off, because i'm too nervous... ugh. i just know it's going to be way worse than it was before.)

mental health

regarding mental health, well i don't have enough time to go into that. just that my depression has been way worse and i've barely been coping lol. i changed my meds and hopefully that is going to help but yeah.

hobbies

i've just been a little goblin who is addicted to balatro. like, i literally CANNOT put it down. it being on the switch is super dangerous for me because i just carry the switch everywhere and play it like it's my full time job hahaha. other than that, well, most of my hobby stuff got thrown out, but i still do have a few more.

family

we got a new cat!!!

when we moved into our new house last summer there were a ton of stray cats in the neighborhood. makes sense, the neighbors are all nice and feed them all so they just kinda are collectively the community cats.

there is a kitten who is too sweet that we named snowball, didn’t adopt him though. he looked like he could handle himself and wasn’t super comfortable around humans (yet, probably)

but there were these two tabbies, one we called Fat Tabby and one was Skinny Tabby. fat tabby had an extremely fat face (but not body but the nickname had already stuck) and then Skinny Tabby was just his younger/kitten (probably female) counterpart

at one point we were putting out food for the cats, but the asshole dogs started eating it. like they are literally bullies and no one calls them out on it. they were fighting the cats on our front porch, so we stopped putting food out.

but Fat Tabby still came around and SCREAMED at like 10,000dB. we could hear him through the walls, with the windows shut lmao. so every time he screamed we would go out there and feed him specifically just to avoid the dogs. then he started doing it in the backyard. then he started learning our walking schedule for the dogs and would be out there screaming at 7am and 4pm every day, and we always got him food.

we sat outside with him one day and noticed that he had an injury. and another cat (mean black cat) was trying to approach all three of us slowly like he thought he was being sly. there was one of my shoes outside and when he got close enough elias threw the shoe towards him and he ran off. apparently thought this was his area but never came back after that.

Fat Tabby was super appreciative, in fact instead of in the backyard far away near the back fence, he started sleeping on our doorstep. we had some cardboard boxes out in the front that we were being lazy about getting rid of and he lived in there, used it as shelter when it was cold and raining. yeah that lasted about a week before we just brought him inside lmao. brought him inside, quarantined him in my bathroom in case he had cooties and to let the animals get used to him and vice versa.

made a vet appointment and told them that his temporary name was Fat Tabby lol. then the next day we went out and got all the cat essentials. we bought a tag and were like “shit, we can’t just put Fat Tabby on the tag” so Elias googled celestial names and we came upon Maru. we had to go super quick too because we had an appointment super soon after, can’t remember what but we were already running late so we were like ok Maru it is took him to the vet and he got a clean bill of health. the vet said he had a fat head because he was not neutered but his body was normal haha. we got him neutered ASAP, like a few days later. vet also said he was about a year and a half old.

he is still chilling in my bathroom, we got a zipper screen thing for the door so Evil and he can see each other. Maru is still trying to realize that not all cats are mean bullies, and Evil’s person is elias so he was freaking out whenever he saw him cuddling with him. they both seem to be getting over it. in the past few days Maru even started to play with some of his toys yay. he still screams at 10,000dB by the way but now he does it inside of the house, lmao. and we thought Evil (our other cat) was loud… Maru can see directly into my office and meow alllll day if he sees me and I am not paying attention to him.

Evil is pretty tsundere but Maru is just lovey to all humans. he loves everyone indiscriminately and 100% will constantly cuddle 24/7 if given the chance, so it’s hard to get a good picture of him lmao.