something funny is, we have looked for a job pretty aggressively for about a year now with very little luck. we quit our job last monday and without any extra effort have gotten invited for two interviews this week. i think that things do play out the way that they are supposed to. maybe some would argue that we needed to have the courage to quit our job before other opportunities would come in.

the interviews are: mental health advocate at a local hospital and also seems like some kind of project management position at a web design firm. couldn't be more diametrically opposed. one is totally profit oriented, remote, pays a lot more, and likely a lot easier, but less fulfilling. whereas the other is not as profit oriented/more mission based, in person, pays not great, and probably harder but more fulfilling.

i still need to follow up with the local hospital one though as they tried to call and we missed it the other day unfortunately.

i got back in touch with my old friend from those days named amy. ozzy just died, and it made me think about the time that we did this variety show with her. we still have the video and wanted to share it with her. she's still living in the same place and still seems as awesome as she always was. i missed talking to her. i hope that we can keep up with talking more.

it's our brother's birthday today, which i guess means our journal archives are officially 23 years old today. kinda wild. he's got a lot of nostalgic thoughts today, can't say i blame him. considering it's his birthday, talking about amy, and also just sharing older pics with him.

by the way, with regards to transcription of old journals: still working on it. we did manage to scan them all in, but OCR doesn't work because of shit handwriting. i'm going to do my best to keep back adding the entries that i have. we have a big blue journal that was a majority of 2022 and 2023. i think 2024 is mostly missing-ish, unless it's somewhere else that i haven't seen yet.

after dealing with an abusive narcissist for several years, I finally quit my job. yay me :) I would go into more detail, but I think some details are better left forgotten in time. all that matters is that I finally had the courage to do it and am super proud of myself for finally doing so.

raven says I should take the week off and not do any job hunting or chores or anything, but I don't even know how that is possible. like, I was already getting bored today and finally figured out how to use the auto clean function on the oven. i will do my best to try and chill for once in my life though.

health-mental kept auto correcting to my typo from earlier and annoyed the shit out of me but I fixed it. it's 2025, why is shit like this still happening.

this journal

there's no way I'm ever going to get this journal completely done if i keep uncovering old blogs and journals. I don't really think i realized exactly how prolific I am. I'm all over the damn internet. i just found an old random alt deviantart account i had that has a bunch of journals still available on there. help...

the admin at pagecord, olly, was kind enough to help me import all the dreamwidth entries though at least (whew.) and then wrote a really nice blog entry about it :) thank you olly! customer for life right here.

i may or may not (definitely did) write a reddit post over on /r/digitaljournaling suggesting that people check out pagecord as well. I just randomly stumbled upon it; I believe that the admin of hey.com wrote an article about it...? I already forget. the search engine kagi is really good about unearthing more underground articles like that. i'm about to quit my job in a few weeks, and i told e that i refuse to stop paying for kagi haha. that's one of those necessary subscriptions for me. google is just such a shithole at this point for so many reasons.

i also started backing up my old videos which is a whoooleeeee different project. gonna use peertube.wtf - here is my account, the username is needingspace. tbh unless you're particularly interested in videos of my pets (who i definitely think are a lot cuter than everyone else thinks) or really old videos of me, isn't going to be particularly interesting. but yeah.

btw a few things that i've done to help give back to the archiving community for helping me find all my blogs: 1) started running warrior for archiveteam, and 2) installed the wayback machine plugin that will archive any new page i happen to stumble across. honestly the latter is kind of selfish to make sure that my pages don't get lost to time but the former is pretty selfless considering rn they're rush archiving goo.gl, and i don't have anything on there.

job

like i said, i'll be quitting my job in a few weeks (end of august.) i told lyn & a coworker (d) the second i clocked in today that if my manager "g" asked me to do XYZ task today that i'm cutting it short and quitting today. and of course at 4pm (she almost made it to the end of the day!) she came whining at me to do XYZ task.

there is a weekly rotation for XYZ task. d and i have wednesdays. we always do it. but of course there were things sitting there since monday because apparently the four tuesday people can't be bothered? yet manager is gonna come complain to me about it and ask me to clean it up last minute despite me working all morning on getting it cleared out (which is why there was barely anything in there!)

i told e "welp looks like i'm gonna have to quit today, a promise is a promise" and he was like "no, wait until friday afternoon because otherwise g is going to come to me freaking out because b (e and g's manager) is out of office this week" hahaha.

so i guess i didn't even make it a month. lyn said she was surprised that i made it this long, though.

mental health

we had therapy today and talked about the work situation. basically told the therapist that we are always feeling the need to be productive at 120%, so she told us to try and only be 70% productive, and then journal about how we feel about it. so i guess we are going to just keep making more and more journal entries without actually finishing the archives... i swear, i am transcribing them! (and i'm fast at it!) probably need to look into OCR though.

what i'm going to do for work?

well, i don't know, considering the job market is fuckin awful especially since the annoying orange got his second term. i'm getting turned down from very basic entry level shit. i think i'm too skilled for them to trust i'm going to stay at entry level jobs, and too "new" (as in haven't specialized enough in one field) for anyone else to want me... ugh.

e and i kind of agreed that i need to start working freelance/contract work anyway. whether that is through web dev/design or transcription or whatever. i've finally had a little bit of extra energy lately, so i listed a few of my idol CDs on discogs and also made a few websites for my portfolio. hey, it's better than nothing, i guess?

(i also want to learn stenography but the machines are so expensive, so maybe that can wait until if/when i can't find another job... ugh...)

i also made about $50 on prolific last week which honestly is pretty good for a week. and still have lots of surveys available, just haven't been able to dig into them because of working full time. they'll help bridge the gap so hopefully we don't have to dig into our savings while i'm unemployed.

last spending hurrah?

well, i finally got myself some IEM (in ear monitors). spent only $20 but they are surprisingly good. Linsoul 7Hz x Crinacle Zero:2 - affiliate link to help my soon to be broke ass or non-affiliate/vanilla link if you want - which is basically just what reddit suggested for inexpensive IEMs. i just grabbed them so i have a more portable solution when trying to play the steam deck instead of carrying around my big ass mixing headphones. and needed some wireless ones because i didn't want audio delay when playing rhythm games and wanted higher quality audio.

i pulled out my old ipod nano gen 2 and gen 3 (!) being like "wow these headphones don't work with my shitty phone because my phone only takes USB-C headphones even the dongle isn't supported" and then searched reddit and someone suggested to use an old phone and it's like, duh, of course that's the answer. i have a pixel 2 just sitting there begging to be used as a glorified mp3 player, it's even stripped down to the bare basics and has a custom ROM on it.

but yeah, just wanted some way to make myself not go crazy when being unemployed. i haven't been unemployed for over a decade, so i have no clue how long i'm going to be able to last without pulling my hair out... well, i'll do what i can, and keep working on my little projects to hopefully help make some more money.

steve

steve may or may not be getting a divorce... whew. whole different subject. maybe for next time.

anywho i gotta go as maru keeps walking all over the keyboard and trying to help me write this entry. i appreciate his gusto but no.

ttyl 😍 sorry for long post, if someone gives me the chance i just won't stfu. i can think of about 100 other things i want to talk about but... some other time.

(also btw i just went out and got rid of some wasp nests. went from have a wasp phobia to being the house designated wasp remover. how is that for a character arc)

It's been quite some time since we've updated, almost a year. But we are currently working on adding backed up entries (all the way from 2002!) to this journal. And then I'll start adding new ones. Aha. You know how it goes. Lots has happened, and it's too much to try to think about right now.

i am just not feeling ok. something feels wrong... it's hard to explain. maybe i am just being too restless or something. i want to get something done, but i never know what to do. maybe we are just in a weird point in our lives. i suppose we are. i don't think anything can be done about it. but still.